Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. (NYSE:BEP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And when we assess developers in the quality of their pipelines, we have always been taking into account what grid connections they have and where do they fit within the interconnection queue, when valuing those pipelines and the likelihood and the economics at which they can be built out. A great example of this is urban grid, which we bought last year. One of the reasons why we felt we saw value in that platform where maybe perhaps didn’t €“ is we feel that urban grid has an incredibly strong portfolio of positions in the PGM interconnection queue that most would recognize PGM is a very high value market for renewables development. So this will continue to be a focus, but we feel it’s something that we have well in hand, not because of our work in the last 6 or 12 months, but because of our work over the last 4 or 5 years.

Rupert Merer: Okay. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to limit your pace of growth.

Connor Teskey: Not at all, in fact, when we lay out our expected pipeline in the projects that we want to bring online, that already takes into account our views of when we will get those grid connections.

Rupert Merer: Thanks. And a follow-up on the asset recycling question, would you consider recycling any of your hydro assets in North America? And if you, how do you assess the value of those today versus the value of a solar and a wind asset given some of the storage potential?

Connor Teskey: Yes, certainly. We will always do what is in the best interest of ourselves and our unit holders in terms of capital recycling, where will we allocate capital, where will we seek to recycle some assets. We do believe that our portions of our hydro portfolio around the world are truly irreplaceable assets. And they have a long runway of continued value growth, given their ability to not only provide base load clean, dispatchable power, but also the ability for them to provide grid stabilizing ancillary services to electricity grids that increasingly are going to have more intermittent renewable wind and solar connected. So, would we sell those assets at the appropriate price, absolutely, but only at a price that we feel takes into account that extremely robust outlook for those assets that we are seeing from our vantage point.

Rupert Merer: Right. I will leave it there. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ben Pham with BMO Capital Markets.

Ben Pham: Alright. Thanks. Also a question on the U.S. market, and I am wondering, how do you see your U.S. initiatives shaken out the next couple of years, is that I know you mentioned the star rating some of the projects there, but do you think it’s development backlogs can increase some M&A around the corner? And then maybe share a little bit, I know you mentioned a decentralized purchasing competitive advantage. But anything else you could share in terms of how you position yourself in the U.S.?

Connor Teskey: Certainly. So, it’s a good question, Ben. I think the thing to recognize about our U.S. platform is, there are two things that differentiate us in the U.S. at a level that is very, very tough for almost any other platform to match. And those two things are, one, the scale of our platform, and two, the fact that we have a very diverse set of renewable technologies at a scale in the U.S. And that’s really driving our business in two different ways. One, we are seeing increasing opportunities to provide unique contract solutions in the U.S. And when I say unique, they could be unique in a multiple of different ways. But I will give the first example. We have over 70,000 megawatts of operating and development capacity there.