Polaris Renewable Energy Inc.

Polaris Renewable Energy Inc.

13.90
CAD
+0.05
(+0.36%)
319.79MMarket Cap
Nov 05Next Earn

Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 19, 2026

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Polaris Renewable Energy Incorporated fourth quarter 2025 conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode, and a question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation.

If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press *0 on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to your host, Alba Céspedes, Chief Financial Officer with Polaris Renewable Energy. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Alba Ballesteros

Thank you, Ali. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our 2025 fourth quarter earnings call for Polaris Renewable Energy Inc.

Before we begin, we would like to remind you that in addition to our press release issued early today, you can find our financial statements and MD&A on both SEDAR+ and our corporate website at polarisrei.com. Unless noted otherwise, all amounts referred to are denominated in US dollars.

We would also like to remind you that comments made during this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation regarding the future performance of Polaris Renewable Energy Inc. and its subsidiaries.

These statements are current expectations and as such are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. These risks and uncertainties include the factors discussed in the company's annual information form for the year ended December 31st, 2025.

On today's call, I will walk through our operating and financial results for the fourth quarter 2025 and full 2025 year. We will then turn the call over to Marc, who will provide a review of our 2025 performance and discuss the outlook for our business and growth prospects.

Following our comments, we look forward to taking your questions. Overall, 2025 was a year of measurable progress for Polaris.

We delivered year-over-year growth in energy production, revenue, and adjusted EBITDA. Solid operational execution and disciplined cost management, strong operating cash flow generation, materially simplified and optimized capital structure, and continued capital returns to shareholders.

Importantly, we achieved this while maintaining balance sheet strength and financial flexibility, which remains central to our long-term strategy. Starting with operations, for the full year 2025, consolidated energy production totaled 810,731 megawatt hours, compared to 764,756 megawatt hours in 2024, representing a 6% year-over-year increase.

This increase reflects the addition of the 26-megawatt Punta Lima wind farm in Puerto Rico, strong hydrology in Peru and Ecuador, and solid plant availability across our portfolio. The strongest performance over the year was achieved by our hydroelectric projects in Peru and Ecuador.

In Peru, favorable hydrology and excellent plant availability led to a 12% increase year-to-date in hydro output for the Peruvian projects, following what had been a historically dry year in 2024. Our hydroelectric facility in Ecuador also had an exceptional year, producing 19% more energy year-to-date versus 2024 and 26% more energy in the fourth quarter of 2025 versus the comparative period in 2024, thanks to strong rainfall and an excellent technical performance, resulting in the highest resource availability since operations began.

In Puerto Rico, 2025 marked the first year of contribution from Punta Lima, adding 42,056 megawatt hours post-acquisition and strengthening our technology diversification. In Panama, solar generation in the quarter was 5% higher than in the 2024 comparative period.

These increases offset lower output from Nicaragua, where expected geothermal normalization and natural steam field decline reduced generation by about 5% in 2025 versus 2024. Production at our Dominican Republic Canoa 1 solar facility decreased slightly, 2% year-to-date, reflecting efficiency gains from the new panels installed in 2024, which allowed offsetting grid-wide curtailments, which were 3,500 megawatt hours in the quarter and 5,900 megawatt hours for the year.

Overall, our diversified portfolio, spanning geothermal, hydro, solar, and wind across six jurisdictions, continues to demonstrate resilience and stability, and remains one of Polaris's structural strengths. From a financial perspective, adjusted EBITDA increased up to $56.5 million, reflecting a 3% increase year-over-year.

Despite inflationary pressures and the onboarding of new assets, operating margins continued to perform strongly, benefiting from disciplined cost management. I would like to highlight that we have already announced that we will be paying a quarterly dividend on February 27 of 15 cents per share to shareholders of record on February 17th.

Polaris now has a 10-year track record of consistent dividends, having returned approximately $105 million to shareholders in that period. Also, during 2025, under our renewed NCIB program, we repurchased and cancelled 169,800 common shares for approximately $1.5 million during the year, of which 80,000 were purchased in Q4 for approximately $0.1—$0.8 million.

Today, following debt repayments in Q1 2025 and Punta Lima wind farm integration, Polaris has a simplified debt structure, ample liquidity, ending year 2025 with a consolidated cash position of $93.2 million, including restricted cash, and an optimized and energy-diversified platform for further growth. This positions the company well to deploy capital into expansion opportunities.

With that, I will turn the call over to Marc. Thank you.

Marc Murnaghan

Thanks, Alba. Just a few comments about sort of production and guidance on that front for this year.

As we messaged, we moved the major maintenance at San Jacinto from end of last year to this year. It has been completed and executed as expected, no issues with the turbines, which is great.

What that means, though, in terms of call it total production on a consolidated basis for our budget for this year without any new plants, without any acquisitions, if we just take the existing plants in operation, with the major maintenance there and some curtailment in the Dominican, our consolidated range for the year would be around 775 to 790 gigawatt hours for the year. In terms of what we are working on on the growth side, as people know, we really focused on the ASAP project last year because of the size of it, which is very well-matched with the excess cash we have on the balance sheet and the profitability of that project.

We were very focused on that, and what I would say that given the delays in the approval, which I'll get to in a second, we 3, 6 months ago really started to call it diversify our development opportunities in some existing jurisdictions as well as some new ones. I think we're going to start to see the fruits of that very shortly.

In terms of the actual ASAP program, we received approval back in August from the Energy Bureau, and it moved to PREPA, which is the actual contracting agent. It turns out that in Q4 the board was basically not properly constituted to approve it.

It is now properly constituted. They do now have quorum, and our understanding is that basically the first board meeting of PREPA with properly constituted call it quorum will be taking place within the week.

We do know that our ASAP project is on the docket for such board meeting amongst other projects. We're not the only one.

There's numerous projects that they need to get to given that there's, I would say, been a pause in terms of their approval of projects. We are expecting that board meeting to happen in the short term, now that they have the quorum.

Then, in addition to that, we do have non-binding LOI that we signed regarding the acquisition of a small solar project in one of our current jurisdictions. It's not big, but it's strategic, and we would look to be going binding on that by the end of March.

That's on the acquisition front. In terms of other development activities, we are participating in a RFP process in Puerto Rico as well, that came out in Q4, there was an request for qualifications in December, which we successfully passed, and we're now in the RFP process.

We're going to be submitting a solar-plus-battery with a heavy BESS weighting to it so that it's more dispatchable. Interestingly, despite the PREPA which has been delayed, I would say that the process in this RFP is moving very quickly.

The timeline is very aggressive, and any sort of correspondence is, I would say, responded to very quickly. The actual formal timeline that they have published is that they're looking to have a contract signed by June.

We actually had to submit comments on contracts yesterday. That is actually moving, we're very interested in that in Puerto Rico.

Also in the same area, I would say that while the Dominican is having issues with curtailment, we do think that opportunities centered around storage will emerge from it, and we will be looking at being call it ready for that, and there are things that we're working on there. Then in terms of, importantly, in other markets, big focus going forward now is Mexico for us.

We yesterday signed an exclusivity agreement with a local developer there, which gives us access to approximately 1,000 megawatts of projects. We're very happy about that.

The way that things are working in Mexico is there's different processes that are going to be happening throughout the year. The first one is something called mixed projects, which we were actually invited.

Given the work that we've done last year, Polaris was invited to participate in a convocatoria. It's basically a process for them to sort of fast-track projects slash signing of contracts.

The short-term one, which is we actually have to submit by next Friday, and it's for what they call mixed projects, which is where I would call it basically they're 25-year build-own-operate-transfer projects with CFE, and they're going to be your contracting entity. We will with this portfolio that we've call it had exclusive rights to, we will definitely be submitting some of those projects in that portfolio for this short-term mixed projects convocatoria by next Friday.

Then still short term, but a little bit later, call it Q2 this year, there's going to be a second process, which will be for more traditional, private company long-term PPAs, but where they're not BOOTs. That's expected to be happening in April, May of this year.

The plan would be to submit more projects from this portfolio into that, as well as likely some other ones based on conversations with other local developers that are quite interested in partnering with us for that. Then beyond that, which I'd say is more call it a medium term, Those are the two most short-term processes, but that's not going to be the end of it.

There's going to be more abilities to contract either directly with CFE or with numerous sort of approved purchasers of power there on a wholesale basis, and so we think that can be back half of the year or sort of early next year in terms of actual contracting. There's going to be a lot happening on the development side this year in Mexico.

In addition, another opportunity that is there that we're looking at is behind-the-meter, given the regulation changes as well as the pent-up demand from industrial consumers there. We do have several acquisitions we're looking at and projects we're looking at that are behind-the-meter, and that behind-the-meter can be up to 20 megawatts.

You can get some scale in behind-the-meter projects now in Mexico. I would say with Mexico, with the RFP in Puerto Rico, and with ASAP, I would say we are now sitting here with a lot more call it development shots on the net than we had 3 months ago, and I would anticipate being able to, taking a reasonable success rate, obviously we're not going to advance all of those, but that we should be having news in the next 3 to 6 months about defining actual projects that we're going to be call it starting to build both this year, next year, and the following year so that the connecting the dots on the 5-year plan will be much clearer to investors as well as to ourselves, frankly.

That's it for the formal remarks. We can open up for questions.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting our question-and-answer session.

If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue.

You may press *2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys.

One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you.

Our first question is coming from Melissa Dean with National Bank Capital Markets. Your line is live.

Melissa Deane

Hey, team. Thanks for taking my question.

Just firstly, I wanted to ask you guys about your M&A pipeline. You mentioned a couple opportunities in your prepared remarks, but yeah, could you just walk us through the pipeline you're seeing in Latin America, and what kind of valuation multiples and IRRs you're seeing, if anything's changed since the last time we spoke?

Then you also mentioned in your prepared remarks a non-binding LOI that you signed. If you could provide more detail there as well, that would be great.

Marc Murnaghan

Just on that one, given that it's non-binding, we haven't press released, but it's not a large project. It's reasonably strategic in terms of it's essentially co-located with one of our other solar projects.

I think there's a high-degree of likelihood we convert that to a binding deal, but just think of it as about 10 megawatts. It's not huge.

We quite like the economics and there's just synergies there, we think it's a good transaction. In terms of the overall pipeline, I would say, in terms of multiples for just the things we're generally looking at, it is a range.

I would say it's maybe it's 6.5 to 7 on the low end, 8.5 to 9 on the high end, but I wouldn't say that it's really increased in terms of our pipeline. Partly that's just because we are in several processes, but we've seen a lot more of what I would call mid- to late-stage development, which are technically acquisitions, but they're really just us coming in and taking over.

That is really really increased. When we look at those, whether it's batteries or solar or a combination of the two, the construction risk and the construction timeline being call it we think that the risk is relatively low, timelines are relatively low, that your all-in sort of multiple on those is just significantly lower than what we're seeing on the acquisition side that the gap just doesn't justify really going for these acquisitions.

It justifies going for call it the shovel-ready or 6 months shovel-ready type projects, which is what we're seeing in for sure Puerto Rico, couple of the other markets, and for sure Mexico now. I would say that I wouldn't want people to think there's a ton of M&A activity for this year.

I think it's going to be much more on the late-stage development activity.

Melissa Deane

You're seeing a stronger skew of potential for, I guess, in-development assets than operating, or better returns, I guess, right now at this point?

Marc Murnaghan

Yes, and part of that, too, is I would say there's been a real push by offtakers in all the jurisdictions we're seeing that where there's activity that are forcing developers to basically partner with people with a balance sheet, track record, and ability to put up LCs or guarantees prior to getting contracts. The developers can't go all the way to having a PPA in hand and then selling it to the top bidder.

That's just not possible anymore. They're being forced basically to come sooner, which is making the economics more attractive for call it companies like ourselves that do have access to capital.

Melissa Deane

Perfect. That's very helpful.

Just on the Mexico opportunity that you mentioned, you said I think 1,000 megawatts of project availability, signing an exclusivity agreement. Can you talk about the PPA structures you're seeing in the Mexico market in terms of contract duration and what kind of IRR opportunities you're seeing there as well?

Marc Murnaghan

The durations are I'd say low end 15, but 20 to 25 is typical. Good good duration.

The way that you are required to have 3-hour sorry, 30% coverage with storage for 3 hours, not 4, which is interesting. As long as you have that, you can get capacity.

They're not just energy PPAs, they're sort of energy plus capacity. I would say that the economics sort of breakdown that it's call it approximately 70% is your energy and 30% is your capacity, but they're both, you're actually getting contracted for the capacity for the life of it.

It's not as if you get a contracted energy price and then you're going spot on the capacity. You're getting both for the life of the contract.

In terms of IRRs, I would say, for the cleanest sort of CFE highest-credit quality, you're going to be in the 12% to 14%, and then IRR, and then others, what we're saying, that would bring that 13% to 16%. I'd still say it's mid-teens, maybe 14% is the right number.

Strategically for the company, I think what we're really trying to do, it's not as high as what we see, for instance, Puerto Rico or the call it Dominican or call it Caribbean, but we do think that bringing on those megawatts is much more call it predictable in terms of timeline. It's much bigger, the market.

It's a very small market share that we need to be call it material for Polaris. The combination, I would say, of call it megawatts coming from that market, i.e., Mexico, on a much more call it bankable basis with the much higher-impact returns from the Caribbean is the combination we're looking for.

Now, a lot of that realistically, though, in Mexico is not going to be shovel-ready until call it Q4 or Q1 of next year. The timing of it is important, too, which is we get the ASAP, that's going to become this year's big capex project, but then we will have something, I would say, in Mexico on the back of that, but more for next year.

Melissa Deane

Understood. Just for those Mexico projects, the construction timeline, I believe for SM-1 in Puerto Rico was 12 months or less.

Are you seeing similar construction timelines for Mexico or do these

Marc Murnaghan

differ

Melissa Deane

quite materially?

Marc Murnaghan

No, I would say 12, 15 months, similar, very similar.

Melissa Deane

Perfect. I'll hop back in the queue.

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is coming from Nicholas Boychuk with ATB Cormark.

Your line is live.

Nicholas Boychuk

Thanks. Morning, Marc.

Just coming back to the Dominican, I'm wondering if you can kind of expand a little bit more on that curtailment issue, specifically how much it might impact this year, if there's anything you can do about it. I know you mentioned that they are looking to do battery energy storage, but it feels like that absolutely has to happen here.

I'm curious what signals you're getting from the regulators in the Dominican as to the size and urgency of needing battery energy storage on their grid.

Marc Murnaghan

We were about 6,000 megawatt hours last year. It's hard to gauge exactly where that's going to land this year.

I think that's a reasonable number. I think our budget, to be conservative, is we assume sort of 10,000 for this year.

Then we think it'll drop because we know that they are taking the storage, [chuckle] seriously. Now I don't want to sort of really promise anything on sort of us doing more storage there, though, but we're going to try to be in the mix.

What I can say is that we do know they're taking it very seriously, and based on what we have heard from them, and what we're seeing them do is that they would agree with our assessment, which is that the best way sort of forward here is to have numerous sites, call it storage as transmission, just to absorb that energy in the middle of the day. They have very expensive cost energy and a need at night.

It's not as if they're in all wash in energy from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. They need it.

It's that they just have too much during the day. I don't think there's any disagreement now in terms of the way forward.

It's going to be hard to handicap exactly what we can do there. I think sort of short term, call it more curtailment this year, but I do think they'll get their act together, starting next year that they will have resolved the situation at some point next year in terms of the actual curtailment.

We'll see what we can do, and I think if we can do that, as long as they do that, I think it is a market you still want to participate in in some form or fashion. Yeah.

Right.

Nicholas Boychuk

Understood. You mentioned there's a couple new relationships with local developers, and it sounds like the activity in that sphere is really picking up.

I'm curious if you can expand a little bit on the drivers behind that. Is it as much a lack of capital in the local market where these guys need to partner with someone like yourself?

You mentioned that, but I'm curious if it's also a bit of a nationalization in energy sovereignty and these regulators are pushing more of this in their market to decouple from things like fossil fuels. I guess the whole point of the question is trying to figure out, is this the earliest innings of a push like this and are we going to see a lot more activity in the coming 6, 12, 18 months?

Just

Marc Murnaghan

so in terms of actual country, I would say that the dynamic that I was mentioning of developers are being sort of forced to talk to companies like us earlier, I would say we're seeing that in every market that we're in. I think that the driving factor is more that whichever the government entity is that's running a process or that's the contracting entity, I think have had experiences where they've just dealt with a lot of developers that couldn't get a project to the finish line.

That just seems to be a thread in all these markets. It's not specific to any one.

I think that's the reason why it's happening. I think we're just in a nice position there with cash on the balance sheet and operating track record in the region that we tick the boxes.

It was literally just we started looking at projects, for instance, in Mexico, last January, quietly, and met with a bunch of the different government entities. It was only because of that that we actually got invited to participate.

When we got the invitation to participate, we didn't have a specific project. We have specific projects now that we're going to be submitting, but we got invited to participate just because of our CV, call it.

No sort of small developers without operating experience were invited. I don't know if I'm answering.

I think there was seven questions in your question, ask away, but didn't answer them all.

Nicholas Boychuk

Right, I guess the only other thing is if you're hearing anything about energy sovereignty and the decoupling of fossil fuels.

Marc Murnaghan

Sorry, energy what? I missed that word, Nick.

Nicholas Boychuk

Energy sovereignty. Just making sure that these grids are not in any way tied to external markets, like the US supplying fossil fuels and natural gas and diesel.

Marc Murnaghan

No, I'm not hearing that. I think they do want to be self-sufficient.

I think, unfortunately, on that issue, Nick, I'd say it's almost different for every different market we're looking at. For instance, obviously, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, it's got its own character.

Mexico, I would actually say us being a Canadian company is quite helpful there. DR, I would say where they're at, it has much more to do with call it the too much energy in the day, i.e., curtailment issue, is absolutely the driving factor.

I would say there's no common thread on that front in the different markets that we're in. Yep,

Nicholas Boychuk

makes sense. Then last for me, just on timing and magnitude of capex.

If ASAP goes through with this now-in-quorum board, when do you think that would turn on? How are you thinking about overall capital availability for that, potentially battery energy storage in the Dominican, these other RFPs in Puerto Rico, your 1,000 megawatts in Mexico?

That's a lot of irons in the fire. How are you feeling about the balance sheet?

Marc Murnaghan

I would also say that we've moved a bit to last year was we had other irons in the fire, as but we really were focused on the ASAP. We are, we're more on the have many more irons in the fire and then to get the optionality for us.

I would also say that I am relatively confident that with our cash position, but also still a conservative balance sheet, that our ability to raise, I would say, fixed-income capital to top up there is quite significant and at rates that are better than what we did before, and those rates can work in all of these markets we're looking at in terms of the growth opportunities. We want a lot more irons in the fire, and I think we can fund what we're looking at.

The theory's a bit like let's get to the point where we have, call it too much to do, and then we have to start paring back and choosing. I would say this year, it's still most likely call it tiny acquisition, ASAP, and then call it announcements and dotting the i's, crossing the t's on capex programs that are realistically going to start maybe Q4, but I'd say more likely starting Q1, Q2, Q3 next year for projects that are coming online.

If you call it ASAP is coming online Q1, Q2 next year, the rest of it is, call it, 12 months behind that. And 12, I would say 12 and 24 months behind that, you're going to see sort of some clarity on what '27 is going to look like, the capex this year for '27 cash flow, but also then having a line of sight on realistically capex for '27 and '28 for revenue, cash flow in '28, '29.

Nicholas Boychuk

Good. Got it.

Thank you.

Marc Murnaghan

Everything we're seeing, at least that we're working on, is such that it's all, I would say, chunky enough that the call it the numbers that we have in our presentation for where we'd be in 2029, they're big enough to get there.

Nicholas Boychuk

Perfect.

Marc Murnaghan

One add I would say is that, I wouldn't say this let's say for Puerto Rico or Dominican, but what I would say for Mexico is if there's too much, quote-unquote, I don't think there's going to be. I think we need to assume there's a certain hit rate, right?

If there was, I would say there's a lot of local capital there that is very interested in participating alongside companies like ours. I do think that It's early days, but I do think there's a possibility that we don't need to be 100% of the local sort of SPV.

If there's a lot of megawatts there, I think we can find relatively attractively priced capital both on a debt and an equity side there.

Operator

Thank you. As we have no further questions on the lines at this time, this will conclude today's Q&A session and today's conference.

You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day, and we thank you for your participation.

Marc Murnaghan

Thank you.