John Kousinioris: Yes. Mark, maybe I’ll start with the back half of your question. Look, as we were progressing our development pipeline, the projects that were sort of next up in terms of moving through the process for us would have been Riplinger and SunHills Solar. And I think generally, we would have been looking to begin advancing approvals for those projects kind of in the back half of this year and the early part of next year. So, I would say that those projects, which we continue to work on would be a little bit delayed in terms of being sort of in the permitting queue to get them completed. We’ll see how the consultation progresses. I think there’s a strong desire on part of the province to ensure reliability in the grid, which makes sense for us.
That’s something that we’ve been speaking to. And also, the notion of making sure that various stakeholders and rural parts of the province that are being impacted by the dramatic renewables growth that we’ve seen have been addressed. You also have to remember that our development pipeline also has an extensive exposure to projects in the United States and Australia. And we’re able to accelerate and kind of, move the focus of the growth that we have in the different jurisdictions. But from a long-term perspective, I don’t think we’re expecting much in the way of change. It’s sort of business as usual. On your question on pricing, when we look at sort of 2024, the balance of 2023 and into probably even 2025, I would say, Todd, I’m not sure that we think that the announcements [would] (ph) have much in the way of a significant impact.
There’s plenty of projects that are under construction. There are some large gas plants that are looking coming in, most notably Kineticor and also the Suncor plant at the tail end of next year. So the slowdown would be projects that are still a number of years away from being able to see the light of day. So I think in terms of our near-term view, I’d say, very little impact.
Mark Jarvi: And then just, when you think about some of your growth objectives or the main growth objective sort of 2 gigawatt, $3.6 billion, and you’re seeing things like this maybe delay in Alberta, still some constraints on supply chain and costs, how would you frame that now in terms of your path-forward on that? If it takes a bit more time, I guys seem you guys are comfortable with that. How would you sort of frame your, I guess, willingness to stick to that timeline versus just continue to be disciplined and you’ve got excess cash to use for the buyback? Just sort of your updated views in terms of how aggressively you push those goals, right now?
John Kousinioris: Yes. Look, I’ll begin by saying that the TransAlta-TransAlta Renewables acquisition is, at least from our own perspective, a pretty significant acquisition of generation. I mean, we’re acquiring kind of the economic interest in that balance, 1.2 gig essentially of generation that we didn’t effectively own as a result of the structure that was there. But in terms of the incremental projects going forward, look, we’re remaining super disciplined. We won’t do projects until we’ve derisked them as much as we possibly can and are comfortable with the contractual terms. When you’re looking at projects like WaterCharger that our optimization team is ready to go in terms of what they will be doing to create value for our shareholder in those projects.
So, we think our targets are appropriate ones. We continue to advance them. We like our 418 megawatts of advanced stage projects that we’re seeing get through. I think for us, we’re just going to remain super disciplined on our capital expenditures. We’re not going to pull the trigger on projects unless we’re getting the kind of returns that we need for them. And we think the appropriate contingency that we have, we think prices have stabilized, I would say. I think over the last little bit, what used to be about $1.5 million a megawatt for development has inched up, I’d say taught closer to $2 million, but it’s kind of staying around $2 million. On the wind side, we’re a little bit concerned about the supply chain and kind of 25-ish, 26-ish.
There’s a lot of wind development that is going in place, and there’s work to do for the OEMs to be able to supply all of that. But it’s pretty much steady as she goes from a TransAlta perspective and always with a view of making sure, we’re creating value for our shareholders. We will be at our Investor Day in November, looking to update our targets broadly speaking to the end of the decade. It’s amazing how quickly time goes by. So stay tuned for that, but I don’t think there’ll be any surprises in terms of what our approach is going forward.
Mark Jarvi: And just a follow-up that you talked about maintaining good returns. How would you frame the returns on the advanced stage projects now that you have in front as you come to a final investment decision? And I’m particularly interested to see how the returns on something like Pinnacle 1 and 2 is square against some of the other projects that are in the advanced stage?
John Kousinioris: Yes. I mean, look, we look at it as — we assess each projects in light of the sort of risk elements associated with the projects. So we’ve got like an overall sort of hurdle rate that we tend to target for the company and then it either goes down or it goes up depending on the characteristics specifically that the project has, including whether or not you can put debt financing on it, how easy it is to actually construct it, how confident we are the data, what the contracting strategy is. So it is a — you put a sort of lining scale in terms of the way we look at it. Certainly, projects like our WaterCharger, Pinnacle type projects would be higher returning projects than kind of contracted renewables. They need to be, candidly, given that there’s a merchant component to what they have.
