Cloudberry Clean Energy ASA (OSL:CLOUD)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2020

Mar 24, 2021

Speaker 1

Hi, everyone, and welcome to this 1st full year presentation from Clalbury. We have a lot to talk about today and we have prepared a presentation that we will go through over the next 30 minutes. Today, I will be joined by my colleague, Sohma Alcon will take us through the sustainability presentation and our colleague, Christian Hellen, will take us through the financials and Valle. After the presentation, we have arranged a Q and A session. So please use the chat to write us questions and we will try to answer as many as possible.

2020 has been a transitional year for Clalberry. Our purpose is to provide new renewable energy for future generations. And new renewable energy is key to the energy transition. And as you see on the right side of the presentation here, we have had At this year, we started out with 2 assets in production and 2 assets under construction. And then we ended the year with growing our portfolio in all aspects.

We have also moved into the offshore wind market, which we will come back to later in the presentation. We focus on both production and development. So we have our development in house team that develops the projects from the very greenfield very beginning until they are ready to construct. And we have our production company where we have our choosing assets that will generate cash flow to the company. And we are a dedicated team that will focus on growing the portfolio, both on the production side and on the development side going forward.

We have also established this platform that we listed on the Euronext Growth in April last year and we are now working on preparing for a full listing of Oslo Vers during the first half year of 2021. As I said, it has been an eventful year for Clalberg. We started out in 2020 to acquire the production company and development company. We then moved on to acquire both a hydro power portfolio with Swiss Life and also a wind project with 2 other investors in Norway. At the same time, we have continued to develop our own in house projects.

We think it's key to have flew control over the development portfolio and develop our own projects. We have seen a lot of progress on our open project in Sweden over the last year. Doing both these things, we have always had focus on our IRR requirements And we managed to show also the value creation we do on the development side when we farm down in the Arabian Veinan project at the end of 2020. As you see here, we have scaled up significantly during 2020. We have increased our production capacity by 7 times.

So you see here on the left side, we started out with a small hydropower plant and a small wind farm in production and then we have increased this by 7 full in 2020 and reaching about 100 megawatts of secured capacity end of 2020. So on the production side, we have moved from 15 megawatts in production and under construction to about 100. On the construction permits and the backlog, we have started the 2020 with nothing and grown this. And today, we have secured a construction permit portfolio of 150 Megawatts and the backlog of exclusive projects of over 3 50 Megawatts. Here we have an overview on the status of our projects that are under construction.

So the 4 projects here on the top of the page are hydropower plants and the one project on the bottom is a wind farm. On the hydropower plants, we have the 2 The 2 first one here is commissioning as we speak. And we have run a lot of tests on these and they are progressing as planned and we have expect financial close on the first ones here in Q2 later this year. Also, the Ondal S Foss and the hydropower plants that we have under development in the southern Norway is progressing according to plan. The Uddal wind farm will be together with KLP and Akerageo San Maschi are the owners, are also developing according to plan.

We have had some COVID issues here with close quarters, But these are we are working on solving these issues as they come up. And so far, we have not changed any time schedule and We hope to be seeing production from low wind farm later this year and beginning of 2020. These are the projects that we have construction permits, which have construction permits and we are working on. So this is a more early phase projects. Holland being the first one, all concessions are in place, but we are waiting an export license from the Swedish government And we are doing the procurement The process as we speak and hope to take investment decision before the summer.

On Project 2 Beermann and Du Helle, we also have some issues that we are working on. And we are confident that all these projects, we will see investment decision being taken late this year, beginning of 2022. All these important actions and processes has, of course, also led to some subsequent events. So in 2021, we have followed up several of these acquisitions and projects that we have developed. And we have also used the financial market during the 2020s.

And we have Latest yesterday evening informed the market that we have agreed on a facility with SR Bank of NOK 700,000,000 And last year, we also announced that we have secured financing of the Odol wind farm of €90,000,000 So with this, I say thank you for your attention for the first part here and I'm going to give the word to my colleague, Sulla Alcon, who will take you through the sustainability part of the presentation. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Anders. I am Sonja Holkam, Head of Sustainability in Cloudera. Sustainability is at the core of Clalberg's strategic positioning as a renewable company. As Anders said, our purpose is to provide renewable energy for future generations. And our long term success is linked to operating our business in a sustainable way.

From 2020, we started providing ESG reporting in our annual report and have integrated sustainability in our business strategy and operations. Even though our business is sustainable by nature, construction and production do have an impact on environmental and social interests. Calvary is aware of the risks and seeks to understand and evaluate the aspects. In 2020, Calvary's Sustainability management has been strengthened and considerable efforts were placed on identifying the aspects through stakeholder dialogue and capture what is material throughout the company's value chain for our stakeholders and for business. In 2020, Cloudera conducted an internal assessment of the potential financial impact of climate related risks and opportunities In accordance with the recommendations of the disclosures of the TCFD, the analysis Identified and recognized physical and transitional risks, and the assessment will be further developed in 2021.

Certain areas of Clalberry's business will have emissions. Last year, Clalberry started measuring its greenhouse gas emissions and established a climate reporting system to monitor its direct and indirect emissions. The total greenhouse gas emission from Clouvry in 2020, including Scope 1, 23 were estimated to be 187 tonnes of CO2 Equivalents. The main emission source was from the concrete from construction Of the 200 power plants, Bjorgelbergkraft and Nestlekraft. Clalberry has compensated for its indirect and direct emissions by purchasing carbon credits and now is a net 0 company.

In 2020, Clalberry contributed to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The company produced 21 GeVH or renewable energy, which is equivalent to a CO2 reduction of more than 5,000 tonnes CO2 Equivalents. This is after taking into account Clalbury's direct and indirect emissions. Clalbury is contributing positively to an overall reduction in emissions and our reduction is expected to be 7 times higher within 12 months as the company increases its production of new renewable energy. We received questions Regarding the EU taxonomy, which was published in March last year by the European Union to classify sustainable activities.

The taxonomy contains implementation guidance, including technical criteria for a range of sectors. This includes a number of principles and mitigation criteria where it specifically pinpoints power densities of hydropower. According to the report, hydrocarbon facilities with a power density above 5 watts per square meters are currently exempt from greenhouse Gas Lifecycle Assessments. The legislation formalizing this taxonomy has not yet been adopted, but Clalberg is aware of the potential consequences for the hardwood power sector if the legislation will be formalized. The company is preparing for potential risk mitigations and we have done some calculations.

Internal analysis and the calculations between the Clalberg's hydropower projects resulted in Estimated power density is far above 5 watt per square meters. In other words, according to the proposed taxonomy matrix, Clalbury has highly efficient hydropower pads related to the impacted areas. The company monitors the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities closely and assesses alignment with the taxonomy. The development and operations of wind farms and hydropower plants have an impact on both land areas and the river systems. We consider how the hydropower plants impact water flow, fish and sediment load.

And for instance, What are the emissions from concrete used to construct stations and penstocks? Assessment ESG impacts throughout the life cycle of our projects are imperative to the company. It's an integrated part in the value chain, but impact is something we continuously work on reducing. Clalberg recognizes the need to continuously evolve our sustainability work and how to conduct our business in a sustainable way with regards to environmental, social and governance

Speaker 3

aspects.

Speaker 2

With the strengthening of our sustainability management in 2020, It provides us a solid base in the further development of our sustainable business strategy and we are very positioned to determine detailed KPIs. For information on our sustainability work, please See our annual report on our website published this morning. Sustainability reporting is of high importance and therefore it's integrated in Cloudera's annual report. You can also contact us if you want to discuss ESG matters with us. Now I'll pass the next slide to our CEO, Christian, thank

Speaker 3

you. Thank you, Soma. I heard several viewers had the problem in the beginning to see some of the slides. So I can just spend 1 minute to show the intro slide for Anders. This is quite important for us.

It's been an Extremely active year, so we try to illustrate how the Cloudera looked in the beginning of the year here in 2020. You see the 4 projects on the left and how the portfolio looks now in the end of 2020. So for us, this has been a very active year and it's also very representative for what you will see in the financial figures when we come to this. So just keep with me a little bit and we're back to normal here. So for us, before diving into the details, we would like to just emphasize what has been our strategic focus for 2020.

We started out the year, we had a high growth focus. We wanted to secure a good long cash flow from producing renewable assets in Nordics. And we wanted also to secure an exclusive project bank of projects so we can grow our in house and have the dynamics to either sell out or construct ourselves. At the same time, we had Significant focus on the balance sheet that we wanted to finance the project pre construction and have the capital to follow through on the projects. So it's been a very active year.

We raised a little more than NOK 800,000,000. So we have cash to finalize these projects. Another big project for us is to build a scalable low cost platform for Nordic Renewables. We decided to list the company in March and it came on Euronext in April. So we spent significant time to to build this platform, invest in it and now we're ready also to list on the main list here in Oslo.

So in 2021, we'll have a lot of the same focus. We're still growing both organically and inorganically. A lot of our assets will under construction and will come on stream this year. Some came on stream late last year beginning of January, Selva and so forth. We continuously have focused on our balance and the financing, come a little bit back to that and now also shift our focus toward profitability.

We're starting to get cash flow from our production and we see significant interest also from our projects. So to go into the profit and loss, we have had Revenue from only 2 projects this year and that's Thinset Svekien and Reimera. And we have SEK 4,000,000 in revenue and this is only 3 megawatts of rep. On the other hand, we've had about operating cost of about SEK 30,000,000. So for us, it's been a good year.

We're being able to keep cost low in a very active year. We've had significant M and A activities. We have had a lot of costs to the platform. For us, it's also we've had significant interest in our Development segment. We've decided to keep all the project in house in 2020.

However, in January 2021, we decided to farm down in the Vienna project. For us, this has been important for us to show that we're able to create value in the development segment. So we've decided to farm down 80% of that project. So just to put things into perspective, if we sold 100% of this project, we would have about $300,000,000 in expected cash flow 2021, 2022 and 2023. So this project alone is 10 times the actual costs of Cloudera.

So we have had about SEK30 1,000,000 in operating costs now in 2020. Again, going forward, a lot of focus on the cost side. We have built a low cost. We want to be at low overhead and also be agile, be dynamic, be able to take local opportunities when they arise, so we can have accretive projects for our shareholders. Again, just see on the bottom right, how we're growing from year end.

We have 3 megawatts in production. By this year, we hope to have about 109 megawatts in production. So we see a significant growth. You also see a significant growth in our construction permit backlog and backlog of 11 projects. We have not listed our pipeline in the Baltic, but we also have a pipeline of offshore projects.

Balance sheet, a very clean balance sheet. Again, we wanted to finance this project pre construction, so we have a strong cash balance, Cash balance of NOK 605,000,000 year end. We also have additional NOK 152,000,000 standing in an escrow account ready for the Uddam VIM project. So equity, a little bit about NOK1 1,000,000,000 in equity, gives an equity ratio of 96%. Currently low interest bearing debt, NOK263,000,000 interest bearing debt and we also recently announced or yesterday, we announced that we have refinanced, we have a very good facility with SOR Bank and have repaid a short term loan of about SEK 236,000,000.

So how do we go forward? We'll continue to do a lot of the same. The production segment for us, Long term cash flow from Nordic Renewables, primarily hydro in Norway, wind in Sweden. When we came on stream in or was listed in April, we said that the market we expected about 5% to 8% equity return on these long term cash flows. Hydra is typically 50 year plus cash flow and we have raised this now to 6% to 9%.

Also notice the Old Dung project is expected give us strong cash flow when it's up and running within 12 months. This is our largest project, the Holdoff project. On the Development segment, we have built up the construction permit side and the backlog. We show to the market here the value of these construction permits. We see that an exclusive project bank is of high value to new owners.

So when we farm down in Vennan, we saw project value about SEK3 1,000,000 per megawatt. So this indicates a little bit the potential value in our development portfolio. Last slide for me. We'll be growing in several ways. We obviously have the cash on our balance sheet to finance the mid- and short term projects that we're currently constructing.

We're also starting to generate cash from our producing assets that's coming on stream. We're getting very flexible local financing from banks. Esar Bank. Please read our press release last night where we get good flexibility and also the interest rate or the margins on the term loan is below 200 basis points or below 200 or 2%. We also see a lot of interest from large international pension funds and life insurance companies that wants renewable exposure in the Nordics.

So for us, it was very exciting to close a fully merchant project with the direct lenders that was lending us €90,000,000 euros together with KLP and Augustus in Uldan project. So we open up this direct lending possibilities. This is very eye opening for us we are extremely happy to have done it. So we can have competitive bidding between banks and direct lenders. Also a fixed more than 20 year fixed term loan taking out the interest rate risk in that project.

We're continuously evaluating green bond financing, but banks and the direct lending facilities are still at more attractive levels for us. So with the Vienna project that we will form down certain projects that's when we look at the risk reward portfolio, we won't One single project that's too large, so we would diversify risk and also show the value we're able to create as developers. So some project as you see on the right hand side, it's the marker project and the horn project we're hopefully soon getting ready to construct. We've shown in 2020 that we have a good business model. We can do cash transactions and also share transactions and we see significant interest from from owners that once give us access to project or a company by a full or part share consideration.

Both Skoguen and ScanWind 2 was good examples of transaction where we settled the transaction in shares. We also see now a lot of we have evaluated about 60 projects for the last 6 months. So it's a lot of Projects. We work hard with them. When we see value accretive projects, we'll also consider to use the equity markets to grow our for the full year.

So then I'll leave the word to Anders for some concluding perspectives on our future. So thank you for your time.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Christian. I see the questions are coming in. So we will have the answers for you after I have summed it up. But we will start addressing some of the outlook and opportunities we see. We have A PPA in place for our production in 2020 is covering approximately twothree of our revenue.

And we will continue to do similar hedges and also probably PPAs in the future. So That is an important part of our strategy is to have a certain amount of our revenue hedged through the market or the PPA markets. As you see here on the left side, We have a couple in the price forecast from the Norwegian Water Resource and Energy Directorate. They do these prognosis every year. Here we see the 2,030 prices and 2,040 prices from the Directorate.

A year Per kilowatt hour will be approximately as €40 per megawatt hour. And as you see, there are different price areas, both in Sweden and Norway with a different price prognosis. And as earlier mentioned earlier, we have focused on the southernmost price areas in Norway and in Sweden. For the Norwegian market, that's due to the interconnectors And we see that they will have an impact on the price level in Southern Norway. And in Sweden, it's partly interconnectors and partly phasing out of the nuclear power in Sweden over the next years.

So we expect that the prices will increase from last year and also this year's level. We think it's the general electrification of the industry, the general electrification of the society will be a driver. Along with all the new industry all the new year projects, we see A large number of projects both in Sweden and in Norway and in the Nordics in general that is power intensive. We have the hydrogen, we have the battery. We alone in Norway, we have 10, 12 different battery projects over the next years.

We also see that data centers are developing in the Nordics And we think that all this will increase the demand for new renewable power. And as mentioned, the interconnectors will play a role. We have already seen that. The 1st 3 months of 2021, the export from Norway has increased significantly compared to last year's 3 1st months. So all this, we think, It's important to bear in mind when we are looking at projects and our portfolio going forward.

We will continue to do more of the same as we have done in 2020. We see our strategy is working. We see we get the attention in the market. We want to do more of the same as I said. We want to develop the organic in house projects.

We have several new projects that we work on. Onshore, these projects are up to 100 megawatt plus, Each of the projects and offshore shallow water, of course, they are up to about 400 megawatts. And we also see active market when it comes to acquisitions. So we will continue to follow the market. And also on the strategic side, we think that it can be interesting possibilities over the year and you shouldn't be surprised if we are going to take part of some of these strategic opportunities going forward.

So to sum it up, yes, we are delivering on our strategy. We are delivering on what we said that we were going to do. We are we want to build a leading IPP P in the Nordics, and we have come a long way. This is a new chapter really for Clalborg going forward. We see that we have a success in both developing projects, our in house project, but also to use the market on the M and A side.

When it comes to the offshore pipeline, I think as Christian already mentioned that we look upon ourselves as more of a developer of the projects and Dan being also the owner of this on a 100% basis. So here we are looking for partners or we will partner up with other to realize these projects. But we think Having been one of the first to develop our offshore license in Sweden, we have a unique competence on the offshore side. What we can also see more of in the future is this what we call the Industry Energy Partnerships. We see establishing a new power intensive industry.

And we look at these opportunities and think we have a role as the local partner for supplying clean energy to these projects. So that was my concluding remarks, And thank you for your attention. We have gotten some questions. I think they are now being published. I have at least a couple of questions I would like to answer.

One of the question was what who is getting the revenue from the projects when they are in the testing mode. And what we do is we do all these tests and the commissioning and we don't take over the power grounds before they are all okay and we have actually done the revenue only from the start of when they are taking over. So in the test period, it's the developer who has the revenue from the test production. And another question is, if you have everything in place before uplifting to the main list of slow bursch. Yes, as far as we can.

We have a general meeting 28th April And some of the issues has to be decided on the general meeting, Such as a nomination committee has to be elected and also we have to change the name. So We're going to be a public limited ASA company and also solve changes in our bylaws. So everything that we have the control over and we can do, we have done and You have just so hopefully, we will have the last things in place after the general meeting 28th April. So then I give it over to Christian, who will give you answer couple of the other questions. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3

We have got a lot of questions, so we will sort them out And just taking notice of starting from the top, I got some questions about the difference between Europe and Growth and also numbers for us. For us, we are attracting a lot of long term investors there. Some of them are only investing on Red and Q related markets. We see that's win Sweden and also for significant investors here in Norway. So for us to have a beyond a regulated market and also have a strong governance platform is important for us in the sector within.

So we also will be reporting on a quarterly basis most half year and again attract more long term Investors. The SR facility, I was asked how that will work for us. It's a very good way for especially growing the hydro and have the flexibility to grow the hydro here in Norway. On parts, it's divided in 2. It's 1 portion of this is a 400,000,000 loan facility and then it's a revolving facility of 300,000,000 that gives us the flexibility to construct and give guarantees to turbine deliveries and so forth.

So yes, it will give us some more flexibility but also on the guarantee side. Also questions on the M and A opportunities. Yes, there is significant opportunities. They're both incoming but we are also very active in the market and speaking with the local owners and we want to be a local company and find solutions with local owners, so either land or probably face projects or projects close to operations. So that's both incoming and active team both in Norway and Sweden.

And got some questions about value. I would like to say that both Pareto Securities and Carnegie, Their analytical teams, 3rd parties are analyzing us and have done extensive work on this. So they're publishing research reports on us and I will highly recommend for the investors more interested in detailed allegations and so forth to contact either Carnegie or operator for 3rd party value valuations. Also question about Formdowns. We're growing bigger, we're getting more strong balance sheet.

So we will always think as a portfolio manager to risk diversified. I mean, we have project in different price zones and we like obviously the price zones South Middle of North, South Middle of Gulf of Stream where the power is needed and we have the interconnectors out. So yes, we will evaluate it, but with a growing balance sheet we're also able to do more on that. So now will you conclude on some of the sustainability questions and then I hope we can conclude. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes, Christian. Thank you. There was a question, if we could be a bit more specific regarding the EU taxonomy. The legislation formalizing the taxonomy is not yet adopted and We still wait for the outcome of the concluded consulting process that was in process during fall last year in January. But meanwhile, of course, Calgary is preparing for potential risk mitigations.

And we've done some calculations as I mentioned And we do internal analysis continuously on specifically the power densities so far. We are in process with assessments on all the hydro plants indeed. I think as much as we can say at this point is that we await For the outcome, like I said, all the process. And meanwhile, we're also in close dialogue with national and European Associations and Organizations and try to be tuned and take part continuously. So I think that's actually as much as we can say at this moment.

Thank you. I think Anders is concluding maybe.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Soma. You for all the questions, Jari, you are sending in. Got some good questions. I thought I should finish off with answering All these questions we have got is, are you only focusing on Norway and Sweden or are you also focusing on other Nordic Countries. And yes, we believe in being local.

We have focused on using our networks in the Nordics. We believe in being focused and lean. So We have started out in Norway and Sweden. And as you can see, we have had quite a success with that, but we are also looking at opportunities in Finland and opportunities in Denmark. We haven't done anything yet.

That is due to capacity but also to find the right projects. But we are going to continue to look at the older markets in the Nordics and also when we are talking about shallow water in the Baltic Sea, We don't leave it that all into the Swedish sector. We have started in the Swedish sector. Swedish sector. We know the framework, the process, but we are also looking at shallow water opportunities in other sectors the Baltic Sea, the Finnish sector.

So I think you will see that we are also going to get projects or to have projects in the other Nordic markets. And then I say thank you to everyone from Cloudera. I appreciate that you have spent the time listening to our presentation And thank you for all the questions. Please send us more questions if you have and we will try to get back to everyone of you.

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