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

Doron Blachar: Thank you. So, obviously, the more we grow — the more projects we’re bidding online gets us closer and stronger with the guidance we gave on the Analyst Day for 2026. And on the Storage part, it’s a permitting process and a connection process, to do that it takes time. And we do expect that the portfolio of the Storage will grow and will be more balanced between merchant projects, RA contracts, and PPA contracts. The profitability will grow going forward on the gross margin as well as in the EBITDA. On the returns, what I said is that we see high-single digit returns on the projects of the Storage. Today, with ITC, this is the range that we see. Obviously, if the project returns are in the high-single digits. If you look on equity return, they are higher than that even in today’s interest rate environment. So, you can get to low double digits or very high single digits.

Cameron Lochridge: Got it. Thank you very much for that. Just to put a finer point, it sounds like this ’26 target, do you still stand, no changes there?

Doron Blachar: Yes.

Cameron Lochridge: Okay, great. And then, briefly I just wanted to touch on Products. Obviously, strong growth in revenue and backlog year-over-year, but backlog did decline quarter-over-quarter. Just wanted to kind of get a sense for — how you seeing that trending sequentially here into the back half of the year and kind of what some leading indicators are for that business going forward?

Doron Blachar: On the Products segment, the quarter-over-quarter analysis is complicated because it’s a specific date when you sign the contract. So, quarter-over-quarter might be up or down. We are negotiating a few contracts today both in New Zealand and in Turkey, which we hope will be finalized and will be signed in Q3 or by the end of the year. And within these contracts, we expect future backlog to be higher. But, specific quarter, sometimes you sign a little bit later and then it will start in another quarter. So, when we look at the backlog, we usually try to look at the year back, see some trends and from here, it goes up.

Cameron Lochridge: Got it. Okay. Perfect. Thank you all. That’ll be all for me.

Doron Blachar: Thank you.

Operator: All right. It looks like we have one more question from Jeff Osborne at TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Jeff Osborne: Hey, good morning. I might have missed this, but I was just wondering how to think about the monetization of the tax credits, and that flowing through the P&L in the second half of this year, and then, based on the project cadence, how to think about that next year?

Assi Ginzburg: Jeff, good morning. This is Assi. So, currently, when you look at the ITC’s credit, those are mostly related to the Storage assets that we bring online. So, if you look at the appendix, you will see the list of Storage projects that we have between now and the remaining of the year. And, basically, you can see that Pomona 2 was the one that came in early Q3. So, we should expect in Q3 the benefits coming from those tax. We’re currently booking it at $0.90 per $1.00 of ITC. There are indications that the market is going to $0.95, $.0.96, based on what I alluded earlier. As we look into 2024 on ITC credits, this will be a very positive year for us. We have three projects, as you can see on this slide, East Flemington Storage project, the Bottleneck and the Montague.

I think between the three, CapEx is close to $150 million. Bottleneck has 40% ITC. So, we definitely expect next year, if you do the math, over $40 million, $50 million of ITC credit. On a 90% base, you can do the math, it can add significant value to the earnings per share of the company and also provide lot of cash to our business. Moving to the PTCs, as we mentioned, this year, we are expecting to do few tax equity transactions. So, the tax equity income should continue and rise as we bring more and more assets online. When we look at next year, the biggest addition next year will be — in the U.S., it will be the Beowawe repowering. While it’s a 6 megawatt project in the slide, it’s actually a repowering of the full plant and it will be roughly equivalent to a 20 megawatt facility that will be entitled to PTC.