CA - Northland Power Inc. (NPIFF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-02-22 16:26:04 ET

Northland Power Inc. (NPIFF)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

February 22, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Mike Crawley – President and Chief Executive Officer

Adam Beaumont – Interim Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Sean Steuart – TD Securities

Nelson Ng – RBC Capital Markets

Rupert Merer – National Bank

Ben Pham – BMO

Mark Jarvi – CIBC

Nick Boychuk – Coremark Securities

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to the Northland Power Conference Call to discuss the Annual and Fourth Quarter 2023 Results. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on Thursday, February 22, 2024, at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Conducting this call for Northland Power, are Mike Crawley, President and Chief Executive Officer; Adam Beaumont, Interim Chief Financial Officer; and also joining us for the call this morning for the question-and-answer portion will be Dario Neimarlija, Vice President and Investor Relations.

Before we begin, Northland's management has asked me to remind listeners that all figures presented are in Canadian dollars and to caution that certainly information presented and responses to questions may contain forward-looking statements, which include assumptions that are subject to various risks. Actual results may differ materially from management's expected or forecasted results. Please read the forward-looking statements section and yesterday's news press release announcing Northwind Power's results and be guided by its contents and making investment decisions or recommendations. The release is available at www.northlandpower.com.

I will now turn the call over to Mike Crawley.

Mike Crawley

Thank you very much and good morning everyone and welcome to Northland's fourth quarter earnings call. I want to begin our call by emphasizing Northland's commitment to health and safety. In 2024, construction of Hai Long, Baltic Power and Oneida projects continues forward, ensuring a strong health and safety culture on those sites remains paramount to us. This is particularly important for the Hai Long offshore wind project where in-water construction really ramps up later in the spring. So looking back on 2023, I am so impressed with the resilience of our employees and really proud of all that they accomplished. And as you know, I've got Adam Beaumont here, who headed up capital markets in 2023 for Northland. He's got a new role now. And I'll tell you it's in – everybody looks great when you've got a good market and when things are going well, but when you hit some headwinds, you really see the capabilities of your team and the character of your team. And the whole team accomplished a lot in 2023, but a lot of that was through the leadership of Adam heading up capital markets and all of our financing activities through the year.

So the strong performance of our facilities and delivering every targeted transaction allowed us to meet guidance for adjusted EBITDA and exceed guidance for both adjusted free cash flow and free cash flow in 2023. This was primarily due to high availability levels maintained across our operating fleet that allowed us to capture the full benefit of the wind and solar resource there and in particular the closing of the Gentari partnership at the end of December was very important. Today we look forward to sharing with you the construction progress on Oneida, Hai Long and Baltic Power projects as well as our 2024 financial guidance. However we wanted to highlight we also plan to provide more detail at our upcoming Investor Day on March 5th....

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