Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Ameresco First Quarter 2015 Earnings Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode, later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions] I would like to introduce your host for today's conference, Ashley Patterson. Ms. Patterson, you may begin.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Ameresco's first quarter 2015 earnings conference call. I am joined today by George Sakellaris, Ameresco's Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer and John Granara, the Company's Chief Financial Officer. On today's call management will review the operating and financial highlights of the first quarter as well as assess our outlook for the balance of the year. Following the highlights we will take questions from the audience. Before I turn the call over to George and John, I would like to make a brief statement regarding forward-looking remarks. Today's call contains forward-looking information regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Ameresco cautions you that such statements are just predictions and actual results may differ materially as a result of risks and uncertainties that pertain to our business. Ameresco refers you to the company's press release issued this morning and its annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 06, 2015, which discusses important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the company's projections or forward-looking statements. Ameresco assumes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements made on today's call. In addition, the company will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures during this call. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. A GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation as well as an explanation behind the use of non-GAAP financial measures is available in our press release as well as our prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to George Sakellaris. George?

Thank you, Ashley and good morning, everyone. Before we start, I want to make some comments about our Chief Financial Officer transition. First, I want to thank Andrew Spence for his years of service to Ameresco and to wish him all the best in his retirement. Andrew joined us in 2002 a couple of years after our founding and was instrumental in our success. In addition to building our reporting and control structures, he was a key player in helping us raise the capital that we needed to grow over the years. In addition to his work, helping to raise nearly $2 billion in project financing, he negotiated our operating facilities and of course was critical to our successful IPO. He has a great track record and should be proud when he looks back on his years with Ameresco. Our finance function will remain in good hands with the promotion of John Granara to Chief Financial Officer, which became official on May 01. John joined us a year and a half ago as Chief Accounting Officer and has been making valuable contribution. John has led the implementation of enhancements to our reporting functions that build upon all this with work which are now providing us with even deeper analytic insights. John has extensive experience with public companies and in the Clean Tech sector and we feel he is the right person to succeed Andrew as Chief Financial Officer. John will be taking over the financial commentary on the call and you will hear from him shortly. Now on to Q1 results. The results we are reporting today demonstrate that 2015 is off to a strong start. Our plans to restore revenue growth and improve profitability is now firmly in place. The various restructuring actions and efficiency improvements we undertook in…

Thank you George, and good morning everyone. As we get started with the financials, please note that unless otherwise stated all the amounts I referenced relate to Q1 2015 and the comparisons for the year-over-year changes. Starting with the P&L, total revenues of $115 million were up 15% driven by 28% increase in project revenues. Revenues from all other service offerings were essentially flat. As George highlighted, federal revenues of $24.1 million nearly doubled and were a key element of growth. Revenues from U.S. regions and small-scale infrastructure also grew with both up around 15%. We grew total revenues despite a 33% decline in revenues from Canada. I should note that we do have some foreign-exchange exposure related to our Canada and U.K. operations and fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar can impact our revenue on a constant currency basis revenues would have grown approximately 17%. As George mentioned, an important initiative in our communications with investors is to better highlight our growing recurring revenue streams, principally our O&M and energy revenues. Our O&M revenue this quarter was $13.5 million, up slightly. Revenues from our operating assets, which mainly come from our LFG and solar PV projects were $12.4 million, up 16%. Moving on to gross margin and operating expenses. Gross margin for the first quarter was 17%, down slightly from last year. As George mentioned, we did absorb a significant loss in one Canadian project. Removing that effect, our gross margin would have been over 20%, which is more in line with our expectations and indicates that we continue to achieve our runway profitability objectives. Note that we have restructured and refocused our Canadian operations and if we remove the loss associated with that one project the rest of the Canadian business is expected to return to…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Noah Kaye from Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good morning George and the team. Congratulations John on your new role and nice job in the quarter.

Great, thanks Noah.

Hello, good morning and thank you.

Let's start with the federal growth opportunities since you spent some time on that. I understand that the DOE $55 billion authorization IDIQ opportunity should get pretty soon, I believe the deadline has been extended out to mid-May. Can you give us an idea of how you're thinking about that specific opportunity and how that feeds into your commentary on the federal tailwinds?

Yes, well as the -- right now that we are going through and we have to submit along with everybody else. And as you might recall, right now there are 16 energy services companies that they qualified for that opportunity. And the new one at least stays, but they will only choose 10 companies and two of the large companies and two what I would say small business and minority owned business. And we feel very good about it because of our track records in the federal sector. So I think that we will be one of the companies that would be selected and I think in the long-term it's going to give us a great, great opportunity and based on the qualification that we have in past we have done very, very well.

Just to follow-up on that. It seems like as if - I am sorry, go ahead George.

And the other thing that I would say you know, because that the amount is so large we will not have a contract that still initially that we did have in the past, so the opportunity will be much, much larger than it has been in the past.

Right and it seems like there's a preference with this RFP to be able to bring both energy efficiency and renewable energy competencies to the table which you know, you obviously significantly developed?

Exactly and that was our strategy and next visit you bring that up one of the comment that we get back from the Federal Government, they said you guys are the only, ESCO [ph] company that their board, they are offering to do all the renewables and it just helped us in the last couple of years winning some pretty good projects like the Fort Detrick project and a couple other ones and the biomass down at Savannah River and where we are adding a second phase to it right now another biomass heating plant. So it seems to be working. The strategy seems to be working and if you look at who we are, we are the comprehensive development energy engineering company and financing. So it's of course our business will continue to be working.

Okay, great. And to move to the solar growth plan, I believe you stated last quarter you thought you would put about 20 MW or so projects into operation this year. I see you reiterated in your CapEx expectations related to assets and developments, so you still think that 20 MW figure sounds about right and how would you characterize the growth of your solar pipeline for next year at this point?

The growth has been very, very good in the pipeline and especially for the next year. As far as where we will reach to the 20 or it would be 15 or 20 or 25 MW this year, but I will tell you this much that we will be more than 20 projects that they are in construction and hopefully the better part of them will reach commercial operation by the end of the year.

Yes, Noah, this is John. So as we said we did place 2.4 MW into service this quarter. What we didn't say, but maybe we'll provide a little bit more color for you is that we actually added 6 MW to our assets and development pipeline during the quarter. So we were able to backfill the pipeline nicely this quarter.

That's only for and plus the 18.5 MW what didn’t refill.

Well, no but yes, but that was already in our number.

So I think you had disclosed a pipeline, total pipeline of remind me last quarter was what 75 to 80 MW range something like that, so you've incrementally added 6 MW to that since then or?

Well, as part of that 80 we added 6 of it to our assets in development. So we secured and award, we secured the rights to develop those projects.

Okay, excellent. So where would you put the total pipeline at versus the 80 this quarter versus last quarter or about the same?

Yes, I'd say it's about the same. We're continually backfilling with the new awards and we are continuing to b.i.d. on new opportunities, so the proposal activity is pretty healthy in the solar world right now.

Okay, thanks so much. I'll jump back in queue.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jim Giannakouros from Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Good morning, guys.

Good morning Jim.

Good morning Jim.

George, you mentioned and I apologize if I missed it. You mentioned, I believe you mentioned you have line of sight to $700 million in revenue. Can you break that down in what comes from backlog and other areas and was that mentioned to the 2016 figure?

The $700 million comes from contracts that we have in place right now for the operation and maintenance and that's over 18 years. And if you look at the average life we have an average life of those contracts of about 12 to 13 years there about. So otherwise some of them there might be three to five years and some that go out with this 20 to 25 years. And you know couple of the big ones that we have they go out for 20 years.

Understood, okay. And given the successes that you have in federal I guess it seems like there is runway there. You mentioned that the 4 billion and in the SPCs through 2016 was, is basically being hoped for or being imparted on the federal agency? Can you just update us specifically on is that tracking on pace, do you envision an acceleration in activity over the coming quarters to meet that goal and which agency specifically you look to be the most active there?

Yes, and so far this year it is about $213 million has been awarded associated with that particular order. We see an acceleration on the federal market across the board and I think it has to do primarily because right now they have some kind of a measuring stick that the Whitehouse is using that all agencies they have to report monthly what activities are they actually doing.

Okay. And then…

And as far as which agencies, the one that's the slowest is probably the Air Force and the Navy, but just about every other agency is moving ahead I will say very aggressively, especially the GSA and the Bureau of Prisons, the Army, National Guard. So it's across the board and I think even the Navy and the Air Force they have begun moving.

Got it. Thank you, and forgive me if you did get into the granular points, but as far as the costs, the cost inflation or the execution issues that you had in Canada, you said that there was one difficult project there, what were the issues that drove the cost up?

It was a large project and it was a $100 million project and a retrofit in what I would say like we do over here, high property, the similar properties have been in Canada and the people that were there, I would think they did announce preliminary engineering and the contracts that they signed they do not protect us adequately and that's why we have made some changes in the leadership up there and change in the procedures.

Okay and just on that, and again, John opened up with some comments on the Canadian business if I understand it correctly that excluding this one project loss, I believe John you said that the rest of the Canadian business returns to probably this year, did I hear that right that the rest of the Canadian business still was running at a loss or…

Right, yes so we expect excluding this project that Canada will return to profitability, breakeven to profitable this year. The rest of the Canadian business was not profitable in Q1 as they still incurred a small loss, but as we look forward to the year and we look at their pipeline of opportunities and new projects that we expect we are expecting them to be profitable for the year the rest of the business.

Okay, thanks that's all I had.

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Chip Moore from Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Good morning, thanks. Just wanted to follow up on the pickup in federal activity so that the cadence of how that played out in the quarter, maybe you can talk about?

For going forward or over the last quarter?

No, which you saw this quarter when you saw things pickup specifically was that start of the year or how did that play out?

We started seeing the pickup actually last year by the amount of awards words that we started winning, but and that's why we placed several projects in construction and good sized projects and we were able to execute on them very well on the implementation. And I think what you saw this quarter is not only revenues, I will say they have accelerated some of the construction for the next quarter from the federal group. But although all for the year ago, we are forecasting very, very good growth in that particular market.

Okay, that's fair and obviously still early, but when you think about the next election cycle and any impact there on the federal side how did, what are your early thoughts?

You know because the federal government they have to do these kinds of projects in order to improve the infrastructure and they don't have the money to actually implement the projects using their own funds. You know, remember these projects are budget neutral. So we think we will continue and some of the, what I would say, major candidates that stand for President right now, I know they feel very strongly these kind of an offering, either side of the aisle. So I feel pretty good with the federal market. And especially with what President Obama did having this 10-year plan is the agency is beginning to move and the concept gets more and more traction and I think we are beginning to see those results that the energy feel more comfortable executing these kind of contracts and they are getting more familiar with them and they feel better about it and I think we are beginning to see the results. We anticipate that for the next few years the federal government is going to become a major driver of our business.

Okay, sounds great, that's helpful and then lastly on the renewable energy side, maybe just talk a little bit about competitive environment what you're seeing out there, I think you talked about 6 MW added especially this quarter, what are you seeing competitively?

I would say it is pretty tough on the solar market where we get the advantage is where we have the relationships and that's why I keep saying that actually we have a great franchise across the country and because many of the discussions is that we are winning projects with existing clients that we may have and we have done other services. And even though price counts a lot in these particular projects you will find that when they do the regulation other capabilities counts as well and the services are being dropped off and so on. And having 72 of this across United States and Canada it is helping us because they know we will be able to execute. Sometimes we lose projects, but many of them don’t happen and well at least with us each and every project we have done we have been able to build.

Okay, thanks, nice work.

Thank you. At this time, I'm showing no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to George Sakellaris for closing remarks.

Thank you, Will. Let me close the call by iterating that we got 2015 off to a good start with solid results, employee's notable improvements across most of our business units. Results were satisfactory despite a tough situation in one project in Canada. We are driving a solid recovery in our federal sector business. We are executing across most U.S. regions and continue to build a portfolio of renewable energy producing assets. We remain optimistic about the potential for additional operating improvements in the quarters ahead. I also want to mention two investor events coming up this month. Next week, on May 12, we will be hosting one-on-one meetings at the Deutsche Bank Clean Tech Conference in New York. The following day, we will be presenting and hosting one-on-meetings at the Oppenheimer Industrial Growth Conference also in New York. We invite any of you attending either conference to schedule a meeting with us through your respective sales person [indiscernible]. Thank you all again and this concludes the call and you may now disconnect and also please have a good day.