Cloudberry Clean Energy ASA (OSL:CLOUD)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2021

Feb 11, 2022

Anders Lenborg
Founder and CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Presentation from Cloudberry. Sorry for the slight delay. We have now ready for you a presentation that we would like to go through for the next 20 minutes or so. Then we are opening up for Q&As. Please use the Q&A ribbon on the Teams, and then we will try to answer as many as possible of the questions that we receive. Today's agenda is that we will give you a short overview of Cloudberry and then move on to overview of the last events. Then my colleague, Christian Helland, our CVO, will take over and go through the financials. As you are aware, Cloudberry is the local IPP in the Nordics.

We develop, own, and operate renewable assets throughout Norway and Sweden. We believe it's important to have full control over the project development through our in-house development team, and we have also a production company holding the producing assets, giving the long-term cash flows to the company. In addition to this, we have added a operational unit that has the responsibility to operate all our renewable assets in the Nordics. Cloudberry is a listed company, and we are listed on Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker Cloud. Moving on to the next slide, where we have some highlights for you. We have been able to grow the revenue of the company, the production portfolio of the company, and we have also been able to grow the balance sheet.

If you have a look here on the right side of this slide, you will see our production volume increase over the last quarter. Compared to last year, it has been a strong growth. Also, this growth will continue. As you can see here on the right side on the bottom, we have a doubling of the production from 2020 to 2021, and also a doubling of the production from 2021 to 2022. That will also be a doubling of the production from 2022 and end of next year. We have a very stable development in the production portfolio, doubling the production every year now for the last three years. In addition to this, we have also been able to grow the balance sheet.

We have a strong cash position, and we have financed our projects. Those are under construction, but also the projects that are permitted. Another event is that growing this portfolio, we see that being fully merchant is something that we will take action on. We have entered into some discussions with the offtakers in the Nordics. We see a strong market for corporate PPAs. We would probably enter into a corporate PPA during 2022 for part of our production portfolio. Moving on to the next slide. This is the one that you have seen over the last years. We are adding a new project to the map.

For those who have followed us over the last years, you notice that we have now also added more project in Sweden. On the production segment, we have a total of 28 assets in production or under construction. 24 of them are currently producing, and then we have two hydropower plants under construction and two wind farms under construction. These are moving forward according to plan. On the development side, as you see here on the map, we have added some late-stage development project in Sweden. That's the yellow dots. We have also been able to grow the backlog with more projects.

You see also that we have opened up an office in Gothenburg, and that is the offshore wind team that we will present closer in during the first half year of 2023. Yes. Moving on to the operational update. I just want to give you some more flavor to the Captiva transaction. We entered into a process with Captiva end of last year and closed that early January. Captiva is a company that we know very well. We have been a customer of Captiva on the operational side for some time. Captiva is bringing capabilities when it comes to both development and construction of hydro and wind assets, but also then our operational capabilities.

Captiva and Cloudberry together we cover the full life cycle of all our renewable assets in the Nordics. They have also a digital solution that we use today. This is a solution that is market-leading platform of operational intelligence. With more than 400 hydropower plants on this platform. This platform will be together with Captiva develop further over the years to come. Moving on to the next slide. I thought it's good to give you some more flavor on how we think on the development side. We have a good few development projects that we develop in-house through our development team.

We have also used opportunities in the late-stage development projects in Sweden to acquire more mature projects that are ready to build over the next years. As you see on this slide, we will have new projects coming into production in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and so forth. We have been focusing on building a stable growth, both when it comes to adding new projects to the development portfolio, but also bringing the projects into production every year. We will expect to have a new project, hydro or wind, coming into production every year over the next years. Moving on, we have also organized our organization with the management team. As you can see here, we have focused on the three segments.

We have developed production and operations in the top management together with the CEO and myself. This is just formalized, and we will then develop the structure of Cloudberry and Captiva, and probably give an update on this later this year. ESG is important to us. We live with ESG every day, and we have been able to formalize the ESG process in the company. We have an ESG committee. We have it as an integrated part of our decision process on every project. We are also now working on the sustainability report that will come out next month. That will give you more flavor on how we in practice do the ESG work in Cloudberry. I'll hand over to Christian Helland, our CVO, who will take you through the financial results. Thank you.

Christian Helland
Chief Value Officer, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Great. Thanks, Anders. For us, it's been a really nice Q4 . As we mentioned before, it's been really important for us to start growing the portfolio, getting things in production. As you see from this graph, if you took one year back, we had three of these in production. Now we're getting almost Fossdalen in production, full-year production from a reservoir. We're also getting a new Tinnkraft in production, and we've added on four projects. At the end of the quarter, we had about 60 MW of capacity in operation. As you see, Odal is now coming on stream. Yesterday it was 50 turbines installed. It's growing. It's a lot of wind up there, so that's obviously good for the long term.

Team is installing it, needs obviously to install when it's not too windy. It's going well, and we expect it to be in full operation in this Before summer. Big project for us coming on stream. Also as you see, it's Ramsliåna and Svorona, two hydro plants. We're done with the construction and the grid connection is going on as we speak. There we expect to have the production from Q2. It's also important to mention here in Norway, it's obviously cold in the winter, so it's normally very little production from rivers in Q1 or wintertime. It's not very sensitive these big projects on the revenue side.

Very good they're done constructing and shows that we've been able to deliver projects through COVID times, on time and on schedule. That's good for us. The Horn project progressing well, will add 21 MW in the end of the year. Also the new project, Fekvam. It's a early phase hydro project that is newly supported. You see Kafjärden, Munkhyttan, two new wind project, late development stage, where we can add significant value to the projects before we start building them. Very good position in SE3 region in Sweden, fairly close to Stockholm. Those will be two projects that we'll be starting constructing hopefully already this year. We have Duvedalen and Stenkalles. Duvedalen is not ready.

The grid is not ready yet, but that's hopefully coming end of the year. Stenkalles, we're very active in the project and using, as mentioned in the last quarterly report, top people from them. A lot of things going on, and I think it's about time to jump into the numbers. First, balance sheets. For us, always been important to be well-financed when we're growing, have a strong balance sheet. As you see, very low debt level at the moment. We finance the new project with equity, and we'll draw up the debt level when we get closer to 300 MW, and as we say, we're fully funded for 290 MW. The strong cash balance. We raised NOK 600 million in December.

The cash balance is NOK 1.1 billion , and a little more than EUR 100 million . As you see, no net debt. Minimal debt compared to the balance sheet. Again, growing a lot on the asset side, so we expect to continue that obviously going forward. Next slide. Here we do breakdown on the P&L. We report both consolidated and proportionate. Again, we think it's quite important to show you the proportionate numbers since we own all of the portfolio. We own 1/3 of those, and those are important to us. We break it down and show both the consolidated figures and the proportionate figures. Again, growing the revenue. Very pleased with that.

We have good control of the projects we're doing today, which shows that good planning, for us, good quality control in the projects is very important. We have one project that was constructed before Cloudberry was established, which has been tough for us to finish. It's finished now, but it has cost us NOK 12 million extra. We had to re-dig some shallow cable routes, and that we see how important it is to have the quality control and the planning done early. A lot of emphasis in the organization on the projects and quality control and early planning. It's been working well on the projects we have going and this is sort towards the end of close out of the Marker project.

Yes, very happy with the development. Again, one slide forward, please. Here we show the production segment. Again, we see growing production from 13 GWh last year to 48 GWh. We both have a good growth in the production, but also see that power prices is attractive. We had some fixed pricing 13%, but now we're fully exposed in the spot market. As Anders mentioned, we're now discussing to lock into some longer term pricing. As said to the market, that it will be over time a balance between spot exposure and long-term power prices. I think for us that's maybe summing up the numbers. It's again important to mention that the bigger projects are coming on stream for us this year and forward.

Very good start with a lot of hydro in the portfolio. Then we see a lot of wind coming in, so we get a good balance between hydro, wind, Norway and Sweden. We have a robust increase on the top and also on the production profile going forward. Anders, maybe a couple of words with the markets outlook before opening up for questions.

Anders Lenborg
Founder and CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Thank you, Christian. Yes, we have a positive view on power prices going forward. We have seen quite large differences between the different price areas, both in Sweden and in Norway. As you see here on the map, on the hydro and the water directives, you can see the different price areas and their prices. Compared to where we have our projects, we are very pleased that we have been able to establish projects in attractive price areas, such as SE3, SE4, where you have a large demand for new renewable power.

We see also that the coal power plants are being phased out over the last years, and that will continue to do so. Then also in the southern parts of Norway, we see that there is demand for more renewable power. We see that the interconnectors have an effect on the prices. Overall, we have a positive view of the power prices going forward. We have experienced some COVID issues also in our portfolio and our projects, but we have been able to solve most of those issues as they have occurred. To sum up, I think we have been able to do what we said that we were doing.

We would be growing our production portfolio and our revenue. We have also been able to grow the early-stage backlog portfolio and the late-stage development projects through in-house development. Also some M&A activity on the late stage development. I think this you will see this continue also in the years to come, this mix between the in-house developed project and also using opportunities in the market to acquire new projects. The experience, as I said, some issues when it comes to higher prices and also some constraints on the supply chain.

In Odal Wind, we had some issues with the turbines, but today 15 out of the 34 are erected and in place, and five of them are coming on the grid as we speak. That will hopefully continue developing that project and be in full operation from late summer or from summer on. All in all, we have today or from January 1st had all our production in the spot market. Positive power prices have an effect on Cloudberry. Not so much last quarter of 2021, where we had some of the projects on fixed price, some of the production on fixed price.

Today we are fully merchant and currently in discussions on securing some of our production on fixed price. Thank you so much for attending and for listening in. Then we will jump over to the Q&A session. Christian will start off with answering some of the questions we have received. Please do use our Q&A ribbon and send in questions. Thank you.

Christian Helland
Chief Value Officer, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yep. All right. Thank you. Lots of questions here, so I'll just try to do some of them. The first one was a question about grid in Sweden, and that it's the grid capacity is limited. For us, this has always been a huge focus with our new project, to secure the grid, and obviously very important on Stenkalles, also in central Sweden where we see its capacity. That's one of the most important things we do in the development project, to secure the grid. This is secured for all the projects you saw in the pipeline, where we have 367 MW. The only one there is Duvedalen, where we have 30, and I'm trying to expand it, you know, up to 60, and it's already an ongoing project.

Except that, every project has grid security. There was a question about equity, why it was up. Again, we had a very successful raise in December, attracting NOK 600 million in equity with a lot of well-known institutional investors and well-known families here in northern Europe. That's been very good for us. We have, again, a strong balance sheet to finance the project going forward. We also have a good debt facility and expanded our debt facility from NOK 600 million-NOK 700 million to NOK 1.4 billion with local banks here in Norway at quite attractive terms. Very light covenants as well. A good facility for us going forward. There was a question about price areas. As you see, we...

We have done a little more work on this in the quarterly report, so please look at that. We have broken down what projects are in the different price areas, so you can see what prices we get. It's obviously in the Nordics, big differences between the price areas. In Norway you have five price areas. We are mostly in the south or more or less. We have good price areas, but some also in the center of Norway, where it's been a little bit lower. But on average, very good prices in Norway. In Sweden you have the same. You have four, five areas. The better prices has been in the central and south of Sweden, where our projects are. Please read into details, which is now in our Q4 report.

last thing I had here before Anders answers some more was the production going forward. Again, we don't guide, but it's as we also said previously, hydro normally is less production in the winter. Q4, Q1 is normally lower. Colder January, February. Yes, we expect and having our projections a little bit lower production in Q1 before it starts picking up in Q2 and obviously Q3. When wind is coming on stream, we expect that to balance out much more because wind produces normally better in the winter season, hydro in the summer. Anders, maybe a couple more before we finish up. Yeah.

Anders Lenborg
Founder and CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Thank you, Christian. We have some more questions here related to our project in Sweden and the grid capacity. That is an issue and we are very well aware of. We have had the same issues in Norway, where you have a limited grid capacity. You have an infrastructure that is lagging when it comes to some of the projects that we develop. This is something that we are very aware of. For example, on the Stenkalles shallow water project in Sweden, we were able to secure the last capacity on that grid for several years now before they can upgrade. In that case, we were able to do it.

On the Duvedalen project, we are awaiting the increase of the grid capacity. Today we have a permit, and we could build and deliver 30 MW from Duvedalen. We decide rather to wait for the grid to be upgraded, and then we will have a 60 MW project. This grid connection capacity and project development is something that we focus on when we prioritize our in-house projects and also when to.

Christian Helland
Chief Value Officer, Cloudberry Clean Energy

I think we have answered most of the questions, and I would just like to thank you all for joining in. I hope you have enjoyed the presentation, and we look forward to presenting later next month on the annual report. Thank you so much.

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