Cloudberry Clean Energy ASA

OSE:CLOUD

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Anders Lenborg, executive]

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Cloudberry Clean Energy's Q1 presentation. I'm joined by our CVO, Christian Helland, here today, and we are reporting from our office in Denmark. And we are in Denmark on a site visit to our projects here, that is the solar farm that we are working on to reach a fit later this year.

The format should be the same, and it's a presentation, then it's open for questions, and we will try to answer as many of the questions as possible as they come in. So please use the Q&A button.

On the presentation here, you can see a picture of our latest wind project in Sweden, that is 12 days old, but vs is on site, as you see. And the first towers are erected, and everything is going according to time and we will have first power from Munkhyttan I later in Q3.

So the presentation, we will go through. First, I will take you through the highlights and some of strategic issues, and Christian will come in and do the financials, and then we will sum it up before we answer your quests.

It has been a strong quarter for Cloudberry. We had, as you can see here on the right-hand side of increase in both power production and production capacity. On the back of that, we have then increased revenue and increased EBITDA from Q1 2023. So it's a strong operational quarter.

In addition to Nees Hede, we have also had a strong production in the Odin portfolio, and we have received the first dividend from the Odin portfolio and also payment from our -- for our power purchase agreement with Skovgaard here in Denmark. So very happy with how the projects and the portfolio in Denmark is performing.

On the other side, we have had some incidents in our wind farm Odal in Norway. And as we have reported on earlier, there is a program for erecting the errors on the turbines, especially on the blades. We had also an incident a couple of weeks back that led to park was closed and has been closed and there has been no production for the last couple of weeks.

We have now received a plan from Siemens Gamesa that they will reopen the park and starting the first turbines in a couple of weeks and ramping up the production towards the summer. And it should be fully operational and in full production during Q4 this year.

The work that they now do on the Odal wind farm is covered by our guarantee in the agreement with Siemens Gamesa and also we have availability guarantee that should cover the loss in production during the repair work on the turbines.

When it comes to our own 100% owned projects, they are developing according to plan, soon to be the wind farm outside Stockholm is in operation. We have test production, but it's generating revenue through the company. And we have also achieved first power from Kvemma, our hydro power plant that is now in test production and we will have a financial close next month.

And also Munkhyttan, as you could see in the picture, it's developing according to plan, and it's going to be in full production at the latest end of Q3. So all in all, we are happy with the strong quarter.

To take a step back, for those who don't know Cloudberry that well, we are a Nordic local independent power producer. We cover both the development and the asset management of our projects and producing assets. And we have a portfolio that is important for us to be able to recreate new projects.

And the portfolio is divided on different maturity, different technologies, different price areas in all 3 Scandinavian countries. We are especially happy to see that we are managing to build the pipeline and build larger backlog. So the backlog here has increased with new hydro projects and the new wind projects from last quarter.

And we are also able to move the projects forward towards concession and hopefully also construction and production. So this portfolio is -- what we see is giving us a lot of flexibility. And that is important with the CapEx coming up on wind, for example, we have been able to focus on solar, and we are also now looking at the best projects in some of our wind farms and the solar project.

And here, you will find the overview of how the -- how the portfolio has developed over time, with more technologies, more price areas and countries. We have been able to decrease risk in the portfolio. And as things look now, this is going to be where we are at the end of the year.

Yes, coming back to the status. It's -- as you can see, we have 2 construction projects ongoing, and they will be -- both of them will be in production and producing later this quarter and Q3. And then we will hopefully reach our FID on the Nees Hede project and we have all in Q3, and we have also developed -- started to develop Duvhällen and procurement discussions are ongoing.

Yes. The strategic focus for Cloudberry is as before. We will be a flexible platform focused on the Nordics, focusing on proven technologies, continue to develop projects, hydro project in Norway and wind and solar projects in the other Scandinavian countries, and we will stay with this strategic focus also going forward.

Important also to be fully funded and have a strong balance sheet. So we have the flexibility to execute on opportunities that we see arising in a challenging market. When it comes to the ESG, we have had no health and safety incidents or environmental damages the last quarter. We have made a sustainability report, that is out. So to get more information on our work and what we have done on the portfolio, I recommend to have a look at our sustainability report that is -- you can find on our home page.

Then I will leave the floor to Christian, who will take you through the financials and we will see each other when I'm doing the summing up. Thank you.

[Christian A. Helland, executive]

All right. Hi, everyone from Denmark. Hope you guys are doing well. Yes, so we are pleased to report strong fundamental development in the portfolio, again, increasing our equity from NOK 4.6 billion to NOK 4.7 billion, showing good profitability through the quarter and also showing here a conservative debt ratio.

So this is just a show since we listed, how we have developed the fundamental values in the company and our focus remain on optimizing EBITDA and growing the fundamental values per share. So this is increasingly important for us now in a capital markets that's challenging due to slow value creation even in challenging markets. So you will hear more about this also in the next quarters to come.

On the -- as you see on the P&L side, we keep growing profitable. We are collecting good power prices. We are in the right price regions in the Nordics. Except Odal, we have high availability on our 97% or above availability on our assets. So we have good cash flow and we've also done secured our guarantees of our region on attractive levels.

So again, good profitability, growing the profitability and focus on EBITDA and also now the cost element when we are now 100% owner of Captiva. It's highly important for us. Yes, so where do our profit come from? We have shown now that we take the projects from development through construction here, the asset management part of the Captiva part has been very helpful to us, delivering projects on time, on cost.

Munkhyttan is looking ahead of time as well and showing that we're getting actual production out of this. So looking compared to last year, we grew from 90 GWh in the last quarter in '23, and we had 173 GWh this year. So we're very pleased with the organization from the development phase through the asset management that we're actually able to execute on this, capturing a price of NOK $0.73 per kilowatt hour, is again showing we are in the right price regions.

We're very pleased, as Anders said, with our Danish performance, showing it's been a good investment for us and in the right region. We are experiencing the Odal issues. And as mentioned in the report, there is a lot of details in the report about Odal, and we also see that we have not reported the guarantees or obligation that we expect to collect later this year.

So then down to the segments. As you see, we have -- it's the same segments as before. But since we now have about 100% of Captiva, we have clarified a little bit the names of this, the commercial segment. Previously, the production segment, we will be more active in recycling the capital, optimizing the use of the capital we have there. The equity we -- has had a lot of cash available to grow. Now we will be more, as we have been over the last quarters, recycling capital that we can build new projects, sell down, farm down to low-yielding capital and reuse the capital in new projects.

So this will continue to be a focus area for us. So we optimize the return on the equity we have primarily in the production segment. It was a question here, so coming in also how is the cost divided between these different segments. It is the production segment, this you can see in the segment note, has NOK 42 million of cost this quarter, a relatively high power prices. So we pay a percentage to the landowners.

The development segment has about a run rate of NOK 10 million in cost per quarter. And asset management, we're cutting costs there. It had about NOK 14 million and also the same on the corporate segment. Also remember, the corporate segment is NOK 5 million, that does not -- that's one cost, that doesn't have cash effect.

So all in all, very pleased with soon be performing. We're ramping up and getting about 80% to 90% of the volume this year and as expected, the full grid capacity is available from next year. It's also interesting for us to see that our development department is able to transform a challenging shallow water project at Stenkalles. Now in the later development phases to get this into a battery project.

We have an attractive grid connection here together with Hafslund. So this will be very important for us to convert to on attractive battery projects. We see a lot of interest around this in Sweden, where the frequency market is highly interesting, and we hope to update on this later this year.

And don't forget the backlog. I see everyone is focused on what are we producing. We think the long-term value of this company is our backlog and availability to develop good projects in the right areas and sell it over time also to industrial offtakers looking for green energy. So it is a big leap going from above 480 megawatts to more than 700 megawatts, and this is thanks to a very good development progress both in Sweden and Norway.

On the asset management part, yes, we're getting new arrangements and we're also in good dialogues on the digital to scale the digital platform with other industrial partners. So a lot of activities. That's not directly showing in the P&L here.

Just to give a little more breakdown on the biggest segment, the Production segment. As Anders mentioned, volumes are growing, capturing good prices and showing strong EBITDA figures. Again, Odal is not in this -- the loss production in Odal is not in these figures. So that's -- will come on later.

We also show the availability to secure good guarantees of our regions, that's at EUR 5, currently priced around EUR 1 to EUR 2. The hedging ratio for the volumes is about 14%. So we are still mostly emergent, but are continuously looking at increasing our fixed prices as we draw more debt.

So a little bit -- last words about the balance sheet. Again, very healthy balance sheet. Yes, cash position is still strong and decreasing, but this is as planned because we have fully equity financed both Munkhyttan and Sundby. So we have good debt facilities with the Norwegian saving banks and about near NOK 900 million in undrawn credit facilities. So a very healthy balance sheet.

Munkhyttan is also swap long term, as mentioned previously. So a very comfortable balance sheet. But we also see that our projects now are getting larger and more -- costing more. So we are actively, again using the recycling of capital to build these projects and then parts of the project and so forth.

And we also report on the proportionate segment. So you see it's -- here, we show the interest-bearing borrowings at NOK 2.2 billion and a cash position of NOK 660 million. All right. Anders, will you take a little bit market updates before we hand over to the Q&A. Thank you for now.

[Anders Lenborg, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Christian. And as you can see, we have shown here the Volue Nordic system price curve, where we had peak in 2022, and it's now back to a more normalized level, although it's well beyond the historic levels that we have seen in the Nordics. It's also important to understand the strategy we have on the price areas. Here, you can see that we have a realized power price that is well above the curve because we have focused on price areas where we see that you have a demand side.

You have the infrastructure, you are connected to the continent, both in Sweden, Denmark, Norway in these price areas where we have most of our production. And we have also a couple of power purchase agreements that we have entered into, also on the price levels well above the curve here. And we are currently also looking at other offtake agreements, other PPAs to fix some more of the production today. We have maybe around 14% of our production in -- on fixed price.

Going forward, I think we will see more of the same that we will have large price differences on the different price areas and also have a price level in general in the Nordics that is well above the historic price level or also the price level where we enter into many of our projects and develop the projects.

So to sum it up. As I mentioned, the strategy is more of the same, really. We want to stay local. We want to have flexibility. We can see that this is super important in the market right now. As Christian also mentioned, we are able to convert projects to -- from high CapEx, difficult projects to much more lucrative projects, and we will come back to that later this year.

But we see that within the storage battery sector and also on the solar side, we have lower CapEx and it's really a good time to focus on those projects. We still focus on developing a new hydro and wind projects, and we will have a large portfolio of mature projects when we are coming back to a more favorable market for us. And we will continue to focus on these technologies.

And it is important for us to stress that the development, the projects, both the pipeline, but also the backlog is the future of Cloudberry's generating assets. So we are ramping up and focusing on getting more megawatts into our backlog, and that goes for both solar, hydro, wind and we are also now looking at batteries in the Nordics.

And to continue to have a strong balance sheet is important, as Christian said, so we can have this flexibility to act on interesting opportunities. So all in all, we are happy with the last quarter. We see that we achieved good prices. Projects are well -- going well. And we think it's going to still be a strong market for a more sustainable energy in the future. So thank you so much for listening in on our presentation.

We have received some questions. And I think Christian can answer some of the questions and I will also come back to some of that. Thank you.

[Christian A. Helland, executive]

Yes, taking a little on mobile here. It's a question about the buyback program. So the Board, again, will update if we are continuing the buyback program. So that we have no updates on today. But we confirm that the 2.8 million shares will be canceled. It's a formal process where it takes 6 weeks for creditors to officially do that. So those will be canceled before summer. But from the EGM and the cancellation of the 2.8 million that we bought back in 2023.

Where do you see the CapEx in Nees Hede? If you a year ago, it was a much higher number. Panel prices has come down significantly, and this is also the reason why we have sped up the proposed FID. So the CapEx cost here in Denmark is very flat area, large area, very fit for solar. So the total CapEx cost is -- we don't have the figures, but finalized. But all in all, expected under the EUR 100 depending on if you do trackers or not on the solar installations. So it's quite important to say that panel prices now are maybe only 20% of the total CapEx.

So the ease of the land area and the logistics and so forth is becoming increasingly important for solar as panel prices have been extremely low due to oversupply out of China. This is one of the reasons we have sped up on that project.

I also answered the question about the cost breakdown between the different segments. There's a separate segment note on that in the report for the one who is interesting in looking into it. The important part, again, the main cost is related to paying, again, the owners of the water rights and the owners of the land. So the production segment has NOK 42 million and also be aware that NOK 5 million is warrant-related costs on the corporate segment but it has no cash effect. And then Anders, it's some questions about pull down. So maybe you want to go a little more -- as a lawyer, you maybe want to go more into those.

[Anders Lenborg, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Christian. I will try just to answer as good as possible that for the time being. We are in the middle of having a dialogue with Siemens Gamesa and it's, of course, a lot of uncertainty when it still is early days. But it's been important to us to stress that we have -- both the incidents that we have on the site.

The turbine, the blade incident, the lost production is all covered by Siemens Gamesa's guarantees. We are -- so the work that's ongoing, it's covered by the guarantee in the TSA. We are also having availability guarantee. And the availability guarantee is capped on a little above EUR 20 million for the first period that we are now ending very shortly.

What we see is that we are looking at between EUR 14 million to EUR 17 million in lost revenue on a 100% basis. So that should be for now covered by the guarantee. We have also other opportunities, both in the contract, but also on the insurance side to look at for more coverage, if that should be necessary later this year after the first availability period is finished.

When it comes to the questions to when can we expect full production, when can we see the ramp-up of the wind farm? According to Siemens Gamesa, we are looking at restarting the first turbines in a couple of weeks. And they have been expecting all the turbines. They are now looking into the information from the infections, but they have said that during July, it would be around 15, 16 turbines in operation and that the rest of the turbines should be in operation and should reach -- it should reach normalized levels in -- during Q4 later this year. So that's really what I can say now.

And when it comes to damages and payments and more technicalities around the -- that unfortunately not for me to answer right now. We will need to get back to that, but we will keep the market updated as soon as we have more information from Siemens Gamesa. I think that was it from us. And thank you so much for good questions and for listening in, and have a nice day, and goodbye from Denmark.