Cloudberry Clean Energy ASA (OSL:CLOUD)
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Earnings Call: Q3 2022

Oct 25, 2022

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Hi, welcome to this presentation from Cloudberry. We have prepared a third quarter presentation for you. My name is Anders Lenborg. I'm the CEO of Cloudberry, and I'm joined today by Christian Helland, our CVO. We will run through the presentation, and then we open up for Q&As. Please use the Q&A link to post questions. We have an agenda where I will take you through an overview of Cloudberry and the highlights, and then Christian will take you through the key financials, and we will finish off with an outlook before we take questions. Before we dive into the numbers, just let me give you a short introduction to Cloudberry. Cloudberry develops, owns, and operates renewable assets in the Nordics.

We believe it's important to have a portfolio of projects and have the in-house competence to develop the projects from the very beginning, from the very greenfield projects, and to production and also operation and maintenance. Our focus is hydropower projects and production in Norway and wind power projects in Sweden. We have a very experienced development team, both on the hydropower side and the wind power side, and we will give you more input on the projects and both onshore and offshore wind and hydropower in this presentation. Cloudberry is a listed company on Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker Cloud. Moving on to the highlights. It's a pleasure to present the third quarter that's characterized by solid growth in production.

It's characterized by high power prices in all our relevant areas, and it's also a good progress on the project side. As you can see on this slide, both our consolidated and proportionate EBITDA is very strong performance in this third quarter. The increase is due to both more production and higher prices, and the increase also on the proportionate EBITDA driven by the internal sale of the Horn wind farm from development to production. We have also a tax proposal out that we will come back to but it's a proposal in Norway to increase the tax burden on renewables. The whole renewable sector in Norway is working on this proposal to change the design of it. Still early days, but it creates some uncertainty.

For Cloudberry, it's the Udal wind project that is the one that is hit by the new proposal. We have also strengthened our equity with a raise of NOK 800 million last quarter, and we are now fully financed for around 1 TWh. On the project side, we have had a very strong quarter. We have managed to move Udal forward faster than we thought. We have had production now above 150 MW and 33 out of 34 turbines are in operation. The last turbine, we need to do some repairs, but in during next year, early next year, we will have that also in production. All in all, Udal is now moving from a construction project to an operational phase.

We are also very happy to have Horn up and installed. All turbines is now erected. We erected the last turbine on Friday, and we are actually electrifying the first two turbines today. Horn is a 100% in-house developed project. It's also a project that we have moved forward on time and budget, 100%. It also shows you the value creation that we can do in Cloudberry with our development portfolio. It's also first of several project in SE3 in Sweden. Both Kafjärden, Munkhyttan, and Duvhällen is onshore wind project that will be constructed over the next years. The Kafjärden, we have also managed to get the permission for larger turbines.

It's also a positive development on the production estimates on Kafjärden. Stenkalles is our shallow water project, where we entered into a joint venture with Hafslund this summer that is now closed, and we are working together on the procurement and looking to take a financial FID on that project over the next six months. We have also informed the market of our next shallow water offshore project. That's the Simpevarp project, approximately 800 MW in the Swedish sector of the Baltic Sea. Still early days, but it's an interesting next offshore project in Cloudberry.

On the right-hand side here, you see that we have doubled the power production and also the production capacity. This map you have seen and know pretty well, many of you. It gives you an overview of the portfolio. As you can see, we have 28 hydropower plants in operation and three wind assets. The third one being Horn. We have also four wind farms in SE3, three onshore, and the shallow water project that have construction permits, and we are working on the procurement of all these projects. This gives us interesting balance between hydropower and wind power with the different production profiles these assets have. On the backlog and pipeline, we have also some developments.

Working on the backlog, we'll take some of the projects from the backlog now into the next phase of getting the permits. Bjørnkjærsberget, which is about 100 MW, is the first one of those projects. On the pipeline, it's different projects, both hydro and wind in Norway and Sweden, and of course, the larger projects here are the offshore shallow water projects, such as Simpevarp. We also have focus on ESG. We have implemented ESG in everything we do. As you can see, we have had no health incidents or any damage last quarter.

We have been able to remove more emissions from the energy mix, doubling the production. We have also doubled avoided emission. We will work on the reporting going forward and especially KPIs on the ESG side. On the right-hand side here, you see one of the turbines erected in the wind farm Horn, where we have also had a very strong ESG focus on the whole infrastructure and wind farm and developing of the site and the turbines. Here you have an overview of the portfolio. As many of you know, we started investing into hydropower. We have lots of those hydropower now producing and have producing over time.

What you can see here, that's we have moved Udal, the wind farm, 54 MW into the production portfolio. Now under construction we have Horn, the wind farm on 21 MW, and Øvre Kvemma, which is a hydropower plant on the west coast of Norway of 8 MW. The Horn project, as I said, it's all turbines erected, and we will energize the first ones today. On the Kvemma project, we have been drilling a waterway, a long tunnel, almost 2,200 meters with a 2.8 meter in diameter, and that was a breakthrough on Sunday. The waterway is now drilled all the way from the intake to the power station.

That is a relief while drilling the tunnels is also a high risk element in a project like this. With that, I give the word to Christian who will take us through the financial numbers. Thank you.

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

All right. Thank you very much, Anders. I'll just continue on this slide for a little bit before we go into the numbers. For us, it's been, as you know, always important to be well-financed to now make financial investment decisions on the four next projects. As you see, we have Kafjärden, Munkhyttan, Duvhällen, and Stenkalles Grund all lined up to take FID within the next 12 months. All those are now fully financed, and we have also some excess cash for further growth. As Anders mentioned, Kafjärden, we are now doing the final procurement process, selecting the turbine and provider, and we are also seeing that we have said it was between 20-40 MW. We're tilting towards the larger case and have therefore also updated our production estimates. The same for Munkhyttan, final negotiation with the turbine supplier.

Duvhällen, we are still awaiting the grid. On Stenkalles Grund we've now closed the transaction with Hafslund and are also moving into a final investment decision for that project. Projects are progressing well, as planned, and also now for us it's been important to have a strong balance sheet to go forward with all these projects. As you can see, strong equity, strong cash position, and low debt. That has been key for us as a fast growing renewable company, to have a balance sheet to do this, to make the right decisions and not be forced to make PPAs and so forth at unfortunate times. We're still very much driven by the spot prices. We have done a little more securing of power prices, but we have always secured our interest rate.

Most of our debt is, or all our debt is, fixed long-term. That's typically fixed for 10-20 years. As you also see, we report consolidated proportionate. I think most of you are familiar with it, but the management reporting is proportionate because that also includes our associated companies, Forte and Udal, which are large investments for us, where we own one-third of those two assets. All right, diving into the numbers. For us, a very good quarter. The profitability is coming along. As you see on consolidated figures, we report an EBITDA of NOK 74 million. Last year was -NOK 3 million. For us, a significant ramp-up driven by two things, increased production and higher power prices. This has been a very good quarter for us.

We could have wished for more volumes. It's been low snow conditions in the south of Norway, so less water. That's obviously taken down some of our volume expectation. In the north, we stopped production in July, August, when it was historically low prices in the north. We estimate the production volumes now to continue to come up, and that's important for us going forward. On the proportionate figures, you also see that we record an EBITDA of NOK 284 million. This shows us, we come back to it also, the value creation we have in our development segment, where we're moving projects from taking away a lot of the construction risk and moving them into production.

You see this very clearly for the Horn project. A very good quarter. We're ramping up and all coming into strong profitability has been very important for the company to show profitability in the different segments. We show you the production segment where we are holding our long-yielding assets, so primarily long-yielding hydro, but also now Udal is picking up and becoming a more important part of the production segment. We see production moving from 35 GWh in 2021 into 70 GWh this year. Revenue going from NOK 24-NOK 173, driven by volume and price. We're reaching this quarter a price of 246. We are again mostly merchant or spot exposed.

We have had a very good quarter with high prices in the southern areas of Norway. As mentioned before, the newer projects we're taking along are all in central Sweden, that's also a strong price area, SE3. That has high expectations also and needs a lot of power going forward. Yes. The development segment, there were two important events. One was that it was sold from the development to the production segment, now when it's coming over in production. We also got that value verified by third parties on the same principles that we've been using historically, equity IRR, 7%-8%. Here also we've shown then the value creation. A very efficient project. Horn was a very efficient build with cost-efficient Vestas turbines in the right price area.

We're selling into NO1. The project is located in Sweden, so high expectations on the prices going forward and also a good operational project with new turbines from Vestas. We completed the sale from Stenkalles. We had a cash effect of about a little less than NOK 1 million per megawatt cash effect, but Hafslund has been coming in on our historical cost levels, so you see no impact on the EBITDA, but we have a positive cash flow of about NOK 40 million for the quarter. There is also an earn-out there when the project is coming into production in 2024- 2025.

Simpevarp, as Anders mentioned, for us a very important project, a new step from the Stenkalles Grund, moving into shallow water in the Baltic Sea, where we can use a lot of the competence we have from Stenkalles Grund to further develop this project. As we mentioned before, it's been important for us to be near shore, near grid capacity to lower the CapEx investments for offshore. We believe this will be the first or the easiest to make profitable projects from if we go further offshore and don't have set-up grid connections. This is a big cost driver for typical offshore projects.

So far we're focusing on near-shore projects with lower water depth, and we can also then have fixed solution to the bottom, which is also lowering the cost and OPEX over time. Operations we talked about a lot last quarter. Steady growth also here. The portal gaining new clients all over Europe, which is great. It's showing that the solutions is not only valuable for Nordic countries but can also be scaled to other hydropower customers in Europe. We also see that the corporations Captiva and Cloudberry are growing very strongly together, where we gain a lot of project experience from the Captiva organization now and we're also going into four new projects in Sweden. Very pleased with the integration.

We're moving into offices next to each other and is working closely on developing new projects. Yeah. Time is going, Anders. A couple of final remarks on outlook and summary before we move into Q&A. Thank you.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Thank you, Christian. Yeah. As you can see, we have updated the outlook on the power prices from volume. It is a 10-year forward projections, and it's slightly higher than last quarter. We still have a positive outlook on the power prices going forward, driven by the need for more renewable power, a strong demand side. All in all, I think we are seeing a very strong quarter. We have had significant growth both in revenue and profitability. We have a strong cash position, and we have now a fully financed portfolio of about 1 TWh.

On the project side, we see also that we managed to move the project forward, both Udal and Horn now is moved forward into production and test production. We are now then changing the focus to the next projects, Kafjärden, Munkhyttan, Duvhällen, and Kallis that will be constructed over the next years. On the downside, we see that the tax proposal in Norway has created a lot of uncertainty. As I mentioned, the whole renewable sector in Norway is working to change the design and change that proposal so it doesn't stop the development of new renewable projects in Norway.

For Cloudberry, it's our wind that is hit mainly on our wind and we have also, of course, a project portfolio that gives us a flexibility that if we don't get a good enough framework in Norway and a tax that we can live with, then we need to use our time and resources in Sweden and other Nordic countries. All in all, we are very happy with the third quarter and we still believe in a strong power market and that we will have a good framework and conditions for further developing renewable assets in also Norway. Thank you so much. That concludes our presentation.

Some of you have used the Q&A link, and we have gotten some questions, so I will just start off with a couple of questions. The first one being, when will you see revenue impact from Horn? Horn is now energized, and we will have a test production. We will have a test before taking over the turbines. We will have then a ramp-up and more production going into the end of 2022. You will see full production from first quarter next year. That's when you can expect the full impact from Horn. We have also received some questions on Simpevarp, the new shallow water project in the Swedish sector of the Baltic Sea. Simpevarp is a very interesting project.

It's kind of the next based on Stenkalles Grund. It's just a larger project, but has many of the same characteristics of close to the land and shallow water. The question is here, is it based on any subsidies? No, the project is developed without any subsidies. That's based on the power price in SE3. Another question related to Simpevarp is the question on exclusivity and the way the system works in Sweden today. We have registered the project in the Swedish database under Cloudberry. That does not give us any exclusivity, but it's at least registered. The exclusivity you don't get before you get the actual permit.

I know that in Sweden, they are working on changing this system so you have exclusivity much earlier. The way it is today, it's first when you have the concession that you have the exclusivity to the project. We have come quite a long way with the local stakeholders and other interests in the Swedish renewable sector. We are positive to the development of the project going forward. Christian, you have probably-

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yeah.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Some more questions that have come in.

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yeah. I can take a couple here and read while we talk. What is the maximum daily production you have achieved on Udal so far? We've been up to 150 MW. The maximum is 163. As Anders mentioned, 33 out of 34 are producing. We're close to maximum capacity. Also the last turbine is covered by the Siemens guarantee, so no material negative effect on the last one, but obviously delayed startup. That's important. Could you also clarify accounting regarding internal project sale? The revenue are recognized in the development segment, but the negative impact can't be found in any other segment.

This we report, the gain and this shows how valuable Horn is to us because we have capitalized the historical costs on Horn. The NOK 199 million we show is the gain from our historical cost. It's about NOK 9 million per megawatt in gain. That's above our capital cost. The capital cost is primarily in-house hours for our development team in Sweden are spending time on developing the project. That's the pure gain on the project.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

I can answer the next questions for the precipitation has been picking up in Norway over the last months and that we can confirm. We were out last week, and it has been a very wet both end of September and beginning of October. The hydro balance is up and it's close to the average. It's also quite mild so it's producing all the hydropower plants as we speak.

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

I think, Anders, we also will going forward on our website update more frequently and hopefully show more or less live what our production volumes are from our assets. That's something we hope to provide at least from 2023. One can go in on our website and see how the production is going. One question also was related to FID on the new projects. These are quite a little bit different projects, but primarily all look to be well within our equity IRR range. Power prices, expectations have come up. Yes, there are some increases in CapEx and material costs over time.

We spend more time, as we also mentioned before, on planning, so we are not stressed on individual components and have enough buffers to make the projects go through. As mentioned, Kafjärden, final negotiations with turbine, and turbines are by far the biggest element in that. We already have a lot of the infrastructure in place in Kafjärden. For Munkhyttan, it's also final negotiations, turbines being the most important one. We have the BOP and so forth. It's fairly simple. Stenkalles Grund, the same thing, a more complex project, very important to know the interfaces between the different providers.

There we spend some extra time now also with Hafslund on board to do the qualifications of the project and make sure all suppliers are on board, and there is very clear the interfaces. Duvhällen is the only one we are still waiting the final grid and haven't started the final procurement process. That's the latest one. The three other ones are much closer to a final investment decision.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

I can take a last one that I can elaborate on, and that's, I think, the tax question. Of course, it's still early days. The question is, do you see any changes in the proposed taxes? Yes, we will. We have seen one clarification from the Minister of Finance when it comes to the windfall tax that is supposed to be just a temporary tax. They have now said that it will probably be phased out with the end of 2024. That is one little step in the right direction. What we have focused most on is the resource tax on wind power.

We need to be investment neutral, and the proposal as it is on the table today is not investment neutral. That is affecting Udal and also new wind projects. We are hoping that this will be constructed in the same way as you have for hydropower and oil and gas, where you actually have a investment neutral natural resource tax.

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yeah, just one last here. How much capacity do you expect to be in construction by the end of 2023? I don't know if you see this picture, but the ramp up we have here, you see we expect to have, we have said above 140 megawatts in production by the end of this year. Horn is coming in production very shortly, Øvre Kvemma in 2023, and then Kafjärden, Munkhyttan, Stenkalles Grund, we all expect to start construction in 2023. Duvhällen we hope to start construction in 2023 but, as mentioned, are still awaiting the final grid. There is a grid for 30 megawatts there, but Vattenfall is working on the grid so we can at least build 60 megawatts.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yeah.

Christian Helland
CFO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

Yeah. I think that's.

Anders Lenborg
CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy

I think that's most of the questions. Thank you so much for following this presentation, and have a -

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