After an active year of M&A, Brookfield Renewable Partners LP sees the same benefits in buying renewables developers continuing into 2023 and maintaining its edge over competitors with less access to favorable cost of capital.
"We saw tremendous opportunities in 2022 to buy high-quality renewables developers in our core markets at entry points that, quite frankly, we would have fallen out of our chair to execute on in 2021," Brookfield Renewable CEO Connor Teskey told analysts and investors Feb. 3 during a fourth-quarter 2022 earnings conference call. "We're still seeing attractive value entry points there and hope to execute some of those transactions in the near term."
Brookfield Renewable, an entity of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., closed a $15 billion energy transition fund in June 2022 and has already deployed that capital to buy Colorado-based independent power producer Scout Clean Energy LLC for $1 billion, purchase Maryland's Standard Solar Inc. for $540 million and form a partnership with Canadian miner Cameco Corp. to acquire nuclear services provider Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC in a deal with an enterprise value of about $7.9 billion.
In the last 12 to 18 months, Teskey continued, Brookfield Renewable has concentrated on buying "pure-play developers" with assets mostly under construction, but public market headwinds "have certainly increased the opportunities we see in the public-take-private space as well" for companies with operations underway as cheap capital dries up, particularly in the U.S.
The firm is also planning to sell $1.5 billion of assets through 2023 and into 2024, with Teskey identifying "stabilized solar" projects as particularly ripe for asset recycling. During the second half of 2022, Brookfield Renewable saw "significant inbounds from potential buyers," Teskey added.
"Once we build them out, once we de-risk them, once they're under a long-term [power purchase agreement] with long-term financing and a long-term [operations and maintenance] contract, that is a very, very ... attractive inflation-linked cash flow stream," Teskey said.
The CEO also emphasized that solar supply chain bottlenecks are easing and module pricing has "dropped significantly." Even in the U.S., where Congress may nix a two-year tariff waiver delaying any enforcement of antidumping and countervailing duties for Southeast Asian solar imports, the Inflation Reduction Act's tax credits still provide forward momentum, according to Teskey.
Brookfield Renewable has more than 5,000 GWh of generation "available for recontracting across our portfolio over the next five years," as well as $3.7 billion of liquidity, CFO Wyatt Hartley said.
During the fourth quarter of 2022, Brookfield Renewable generated $225 million in funds from operations, or 35 cents per unit, compared to $214 million, or 33 cents per unit, in the prior-year period. The S&P Capital IQ analyst funds from operation consensus for Brookfield Renewable in the fourth quarter of 2022 was 36 cents.
For full year 2022, Brookfield Renewable reported funds from operations of $1.00 billion, or $1.56 per unit, up from $934 million, or $1.45 per unit, in 2021. The S&P Capital IQ analyst funds from operation consensus for Brookfield Renewable in 2022 was $1.58.
The company also announced plans to increase its unitholder distribution by 5.5% to $1.35 annually, beginning with the March payment.
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