George Sakellaris
Analyst · B. Riley FBR
Thank you, Leila, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we discuss our results, I would like to quickly address the recent rumors regarding a potential sale of Ameresco. While we do not typically comment on specific market rumors, we can only say that we are not currently engaged in any sale process and that we are aggressively pursuing our business plan as an independent company. And with that, now our results. Ameresco ended 2019 with record results across several key metrics. Importantly, we have started this year with a broad technical capabilities and the backlog to produce another year of strong performance. During the fourth quarter, our team did an outstanding job. We leveraged the strength of every business unit to deliver on all facets. We grew our total backlog by 15% to $2.3 billion and our assets in development by 80% to record levels. We converted a great number of major awards to contracts as expected, and we executed on our contracted backlog, which enabled us to realize record revenue. We now look forward with great visibility and excitement as we take advantage of the game-changing industry advancements. The economics of advanced technologies have dramatically improved and are now a key driver for renewable energy, energy efficiency, combined heat and power, microgrids and energy storage projects. Over the last decade, the cost of these advanced technologies have dropped significantly, making many installations and upgrades economical for our customers. We have the sharp decline in the price of solar power tends to get most of the attention, other technologies have also seen a significant drop in cost and increase in performance. For instance, prices for LED lighting has dropped by over 90% in the last decade, leading to tremendous cross-market adoption. Municipalities, in particular, have taken advantage of this technology to retrofit their street lighting. Ameresco recently replaced over 100,000 legacy streetlights with high-efficiency LEDs in the City of Phoenix. The city will save of over $3.5 million per year from lower electricity costs, in addition to substantial operation and maintenance savings. The cost of many of these advanced technologies, including LEDs, solar, battery storage, microgrids and CHP continue to fall, driving more and more attractive economics for our customers and for Ameresco. As we look to the future, it's clear that the trend is moving towards a low or carbon-free environment and away from fossil fuels. There is a report from Bloomberg showed that clean energy purchases by corporations through power purchase agreements are setting records. And these purchases increased by an impressive 44% in 2019. The report notes that corporations are facing increasing pressure from shareholders to decarbonize in energy consumption and diversify the energy sources, as exemplified by recent releases from Delta Air Lines, Microsoft and BlackRock. Ameresco is well positioned to take advantage of this trend as we work closely with our customers providing them with best-in-class advanced technology solutions that fits their unique needs. Furthermore, we are able to give them true financial flexibility. They can hold the solutions themselves or we can retain ownership. We support both models. Our product's independent and broad technical expertise combined with financial flexibility are important differentiators for Ameresco, it is increasingly complex marketplace. We are also seeing the growing demand for resiliency. The high-profile grid shutdowns experienced in California demonstrates the negative economic impact of grid instability and power supply interruptions. Increasingly, we are seeing utilities, municipalities, hospitals, higher education and corporations look to implement solutions that will enable them to rapidly rebound from these ever-increasing widespread interruptions. The military has proven to be an important early adopter of innovative technologies providing on-site power, energy storage and microgrid controls for added energy security and resiliency. There are many bases around the country that are incorporating the solutions into their infrastructure. A good example is our recently announced project at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. As part of this project, Ameresco will add a new 7.5-megawatt combined heat and power plant and install a 1-megawatt battery storage system to expand the microgrid system from the shipyard. Ameresco will also provide operation and maintenance services. We are currently delivering similar solutions to other federal customers across the country. In a recent report from Navigant Research estimates that the global market for microgrids is expected to grow at a 28% annual growth rate through the end of this decade. Our energy asset business was also very active this quarter, with a number of new awards, including 5 additional renewable natural gas opportunities, representing a total of approximately 25 megawatts. Our robust asset development pipeline will allow us to more than double our megawatts in operation in the coming years. This will significantly increase our base of recurring revenues, earnings and cash flows. While 2019 was impacted by lower RIN prices, we are pleased to see a sharp price rebound already in this first quarter. As such, we have taken advantage of the positive move and increase our hedging activity for our 2020 RIN production. Renewable natural gas continues to experience a significant increase in demand as organizations dependent on natural gas look at incorporating this green gas into their mix. Regarding the transportation sector has taken the lead in recent years, we are seeing particular interest from the natural gas utility industry and institutions with many already announced plans to increase purchases of renewable natural gas as part of their overall fuel supply. We believe this increased demand will allow us to find good off-take partners for our green gas under long-term contracts, thus giving us better long-term visibility into the cash flows from these projects. At the end of 2019, total assets in development reached 321 megawatts. We expect our assets in development to continue to grow at a healthy rate. In addition, our operation and maintenance backlog grew at an impressive 22% to $1.1 billion, further strengthening our future recurring revenue base. As a key enabler of the low-carbon future, we look forward to disclosing more ESG-related data for both our customers and our investors. We are proud to report that in 2019 alone, Ameresco's renewable energy assets and customer projects delivered a carbon offset equivalent to over 11 million metric tons of CO2. This is equivalent to the carbon absorbed by almost 15 million acres of forest in 1 year. We are entering 2020 with outstanding long-term visibility, exciting market opportunities and a great competitive position and platform with the internal resources in place to benefit from this fast-growing market. 2020 should again be a year of records for Ameresco. I will now turn the call over to Doran to review the financials. Doron?