Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. (NYSE:BEP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sean Steuart: Okay. That’s all I have for now. I’ll get back in the queue. Thanks, Connor.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Robert Hope from Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Robert Hope: Good morning everyone. In the letter and on the call so far you’ve spoken very favorably about kind of perspectives in the prospective investment environment whether that’s kind of private or public opportunities. You have a number of acquisitions closing here in the coming months as well. While your liquidity is strong, how do you think about the access to capital moving forward? Is the opportunity set in front of you in excess of your available capital, or could you see yourselves maybe accelerate some asset sales to further bolster your liquidity profile?

Connor Teskey: Certainly. So I think there’s probably two things to highlight. As Wyatt mentioned in some of our disclosures, we’ve had a very active year for financings and in particular up-financing. And we’ve done all of that while maintaining our investment grade credit metrics and our investment grade approach to asset level non-recourse fixed rate financing. And that’s really provided us a very meaningful component of the capital needed to fund the growth we’ve announced in a very accretive manner. The other thing I would highlight is when you close such large transactions such as Westinghouse and potentially Origin, those businesses have tremendous access to capital themselves. And they come with large undrawn revolvers that can be used to fund their ongoing growth.

And therefore, as our platform grows, so does our access to liquidity and capital going forward. So, obviously, we’re closing a number of transactions this quarter. We’re at about $4.5 billion of liquidity today. If we closed all the transactions in our pipeline, we’d still be at least $3.5 billion of liquidity rough numbers. And that gives us plenty of dry powder to pursue any large and attractive opportunities that come our way. Given the environment, this is something we keep very top of mind. We want to make sure that we’re always well positioned to pursue growth in environments such as this where we see very attractive returns.

Robert Hope: Appreciate that. And then just maybe moving to the unit and share buybacks. Can you maybe walk us through how you’re thinking about intrinsic value there and more specifically in terms of access to capital? Are you seeing or how do you think about the risk-adjusted returns of buying back your own share versus what appear to be very attractive returns in other areas of your business?

Connor Teskey: Certainly. So we think about it the same way, I would say. We always want to be disciplined in the use of our liquidity and the use of our investment capital. And with what we would view as kind of the irrational decline in our share prices over the last couple months, for the first time in a long time, we saw it as a clear opportunity to buy back some of our shares for value. And to be clear, when we’re buying back those shares, we’re working within the daily volume restrictions of our NCIB and we’ve been doing that for a number of weeks now and probably will likely continue to do it for a number of weeks going forward. But in terms of how we think about capital allocation between the two, we view our capital as fungible and we equally weight the returns that we can make in buying back our own shares versus the returns we can make in investing in growth.

For years, that balance has been heavily tilted to growth, but with the recent decline in the sectors, we expect to be doing both going forward.

Robert Hope: Appreciate the colors, Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from David Quezada from Raymond James. Your line is open.

David Quezada: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Maybe just starting out with Westinghouse, sounds like that is shaping up pretty well for closing pretty soon. I’m just wondering if you could just remind us, you know, maybe longer term, how you see nuclear fitting into your future plans. I know that Westinghouse has that microreactor technology. I’m just curious, will your ambitions extend beyond Westinghouse or will that be your vehicle for kind of targeting the nuclear market?