Ormat Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:ORA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Noah Kaye: All right. Will stay tuned. Thanks for taking the questions.

Doron Blachar: Thank you.

Operator: Great, thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Justin Clare with ROTH MKM. Please go ahead.

Justin Clare: Yes, good morning. So, I wanted to start on geothermal and you had indicated that you have started construction on 50 megawatt geothermal project in New Zealand. I was wondering if you could just speak a little bit more about your development pipeline. How that’s progressing in terms of the other prospects that you’re evaluating? And what the potential might be for other projects that could be released for construction and the possibility that those could be completed in, let’s say, 2025 timeframe?

Doron Blachar: Hi, thank you for the question. You have on the slide the list of projects that we have already discussed and mentioned. I can tell you that, due to the significant demand that we see in the U.S., we have quite a lot of discussions internally, how we can push forward the projects. The 2025 timeframe, a geothermal project takes longer than 2.5 years to develop if you don’t have the resource. So, we are now doing quite a lot of exploration. We have doubled and tripled our exploration efforts, and our exploration team were drilling today between five to seven locations in parallel in order to develop it. And on top of the U.S., we are working quite a lot in Indonesia, where we are drilling in two locations. One of them might get to the end of 2025, but that’s not for certain.

And we’re also looking in other places, in other countries that have geothermal and are looking for the geothermal developer that can develop the projects. At the end of the day, somebody wants renewable energy, which is 24/7, it is only geothermal. So, we are discussing and negotiating in other countries, but this is not yet ready to be discussed.

Justin Clare: Okay, great. That’s helpful. And then, maybe just shifting to the Products segment. You indicated you expect Products segment gross margins to improve throughout the year here. I think you had previously talked about a range 15% to 20% in terms of what was possible there. Do you anticipate in getting into that 15% gross margin range for Q3 and Q4? Maybe, you could just speak to the trend you expect there.

Assi Ginzburg: Good morning, Justin. This is Assi. So, yes, we are looking to go towards the 15% to 20% throughout the year. As you know, from last year that at this time, we had basically no margin. Already, in Q2, we had close to 10% margin. And as all the projects going away and the new 2022 signed contracts are kicking in, we should see a better margin because they were signed to improve margin. And I will say that — I do hope that as we continue to sign contracts in New Zealand and in Turkey, these margins will continue and stay higher than what we saw in the last few years.

Justin Clare: Got it, okay. And then, just one on the Storage. So, you’ve added more projects here with PPAs in the Storage segment. I was wondering if you could speak to the visibility you might have into the gross margin for that segment. Do you have a better sense for how the margins might trend in Q3 and Q4? I know there is still that merchant component, but maybe you could just speak to the visibility there.

Assi Ginzburg: So, when we look at the Q3, we do see some improvement in energy prices in the ERCOT area. We don’t see much improvement in the other two areas that we operate, which is Olkaria and in the PJM. The new contracted PPAs will kick in starting mostly next year, and I do expect to be somewhere between 15% to 25% gross margin. I can tell you that projects that we are signing now, PPAs may have slightly higher gross margin in them. But let’s sign those contracts and we’ll have more visibility. So, when I look between now and year-end, we will see some improvement because also we have new projects coming in and with base fixed costs in operating the business. But I expect, in late Q1 next year, when the Bottleneck kicks in and Pomona 2 will have the full tolling agreement too, to start seeing pick up in margin. I hope we will get eventually to the 25% margin in Storage with around 50% to 60% of EBITDA margin.

Justin Clare: Okay, very helpful. Thank you.

Operator: All right, thank you for that. It looks like our next question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith from Bank of America. Julien, please go ahead.

Cameron Lochridge: Hey, guys, this is actually Cameron Lochridge on for Julien. Good morning. I just wanted to ask first starting on Storage. So, nice to see the 2025 targets getting raised here this quarter. Congrats on that. I wanted to ask, how are we trending — how does this increase in ’25 put us in terms of reaching those 2026 targets that you guys laid out at Investor Day last year? And then, on a related question, I believe I heard earlier in the call, Storage returns in the high single digits. Maybe — my phone went off, just wanted to hear or just clarify that what you guys were referring to there.