In this day and age as the master day of 2025, our leaders are going to share our strategies and the outlook for the upcoming years. Efficiency and innovation are the key drivers of our future. TAESA's 2025 Investor Day.
[Foreign language] Bem, sejam bem-vindos!
Welcome everyone. I'm Cristiano Grangeiro. I'm the IR Manager of TAESA. These are my opening remarks. First of all, thank you so much for being here. I know some of you, and it's great to see you again. We will have a great day for you to ask whatever questions you may have and to hear from our leadership. We are having a hybrid event. We have live streaming in our YouTube channel, and we are also offering simultaneous interpretation into English. Those of you who are attending remotely will be able to ask your questions using our chat. Use our QR code, scan the QR code, and you can ask your question. We are going to start with the agenda. We will have our CEO, Rinaldo Pecchio , explaining TAESA's journey. Then we will have the first session with all our leaders participating. We will have a brief break.
The first session is leadership in focus. In our second session, we will have a dynamic panel, which worked perfectly well two years ago. We will have our leaders rotating and sitting down at each table, and we will have the opportunity for you to ask questions in person and also remotely. Each round table will have a different discussion. I would also urge you to answer a survey using your cell phone. If you can scan the QR code, we would really appreciate it if you could give us some feedback.
[Foreign language] for us to get started, right?
To properly start, with no further ado, we'll start with a video.
[Foreign language] O impulso tem o poder de mudar o rumo do mundo.
We have the power to change the outcome of history. When we have a greater purpose, we can transform millions of lives. Energy fosters education, changes industries, and allows for people to have greater quality of life.
[Foreign language] an essential factor for the development of small businesses.
It's key for developing any and all nation.
[Foreign language] E para que o Brasil possa avançar.
For Brazil, to make further progress in infrastructure, TAESA connects the five regions of Brazil with safe and reliable energy.
[Foreign language] A intenção de mais de 15,000 pontos de alimentação e transmissão de energia.
We have over 40 concessions under our company.
[Foreign language] Crescemos continuamente.
We grow in technology. We are always growing, investing in technology, innovation, and in our key assets that are our people.
[Foreign language] Somos nós.
We, as TAESA, function as evolution. We make TAESA. We drive change.
[Foreign language] Nossas operações utilizam sistemas de gestão de recursos.
Our operations use advanced monitoring and prediction systems, allowing for us to increase our efficiency.
[Foreign language] A excelência técnica.
We bring together technical expertise to enhance responsible practices, respecting any and all communities where we operate. We promote a workplace that brings together diversity and inclusion and allows us to grow and become stronger.
[Foreign language] E manter a disponibilidade.
Safety is a key driver of our company.
[Foreign language] E o cuidado.
We always prioritize prevention and care for life.
[Foreign language] E transparência.
Ethics, integrity, and transparency are also key values of our company.
[Foreign language] E muitas colaborações.
Which help to have close relationships with our stakeholders, shareholders, and key partners.
[Foreign language] futuro sustentável.
That's how we create value for society and build a sustainable future every day.
[Foreign language] Inspira.
TAESA is about efficiency, an inspiring efficiency that drives change.
[Foreign language] This is a small sample of what this is.
This is just a boiler of what our company is.
Filho, nosso Diretor-Presidente.
To start, I would like to invite to the stage Rinaldo Pecchio to explain a little bit about the company's journey to this day.
[Foreign language] Bom dia.
Good morning, everyone.
[Foreign language] Falar pouquinho como o que a gente pensou fazer aqui. Nós temos.
We decided to start the event and bring all our leadership to have a really interactive session.
[Foreign language] A gente vai conversar aqui, a gente apresenta.
We've presented some topics that are key for our company, and you will have the opportunity to ask questions about our comments on how we are going to address each and all of those topics. Like Cristiano mentioned, we have done these dynamic roundtables two years ago, and we decided to redo it.
Redo.
Just do it again since it worked really well.
[Foreign language] A gente tem contato com a área de.
We hope you will have a really fruitful session today. We will have everyone here coordinating, and I believe you will have the opportunity to ask whatever questions you may have.
[Foreign language] Mas registra.
To start, we will talk about the role of transmission lines and the role they play in developing Brazil in the world.
[Foreign language] Entendi.
Here we are bridging the gap from where we are today to where we want to be in the future.
[Foreign language] Essa é a nossa ideia aqui.
We will talk about how we see TAESA today and how we see TAESA in the future.
[Foreign language] A gente vai focar nos resultados aí durante essa nossa reunião.
In addition, we are also going to address some key topics, and it's important to point out a few things.
[Foreign language] É a questão de confiabilidade e segurança sistêmica.
We are going to talk about systemic reliability and safety. When we talk about energy, we have diverse sources, and you need to connect blocks.
[Foreign language] A gente tem.
Considering generation and consumption.
[Foreign language] Aquela energia instantânea.
There is the need of instantaneous energy with high reliability.
[Foreign language] Entendi.
Brazil has been working properly.
[Foreign language] A perspectiva de crescimento do.
We look into any growth outlook for the industry. I think we've been doing well, but there are some major challenges to really keep this connection, considering the different sources and the consumption, and just to meet the market demands.
[Foreign language] Regulatórias e as políticas.
We also have strict regulatory conditions for this transmission and connection to happen. This is one thing I wanted to point out too. We need to always focus on reliability and speak on safety, and with [Albis], we'll later on explain how we address this topic and what the outlook is for the sector.
[Foreign language] Planejamento setorial.
In addition, we talk about sector planning, which has to do with what I've just mentioned.
[Foreign language] As cargas.
This has to do with these generation blocks, the consumption, the behavior.
[Foreign language] Uma oportunidade.
As TAESA, we see that as great opportunities, new possibilities of investments. We are going to touch base on some issues that the market is interested in, like debt level. What we believe is that we have a bright future ahead in this industry.
[Foreign language] Então.
We see transmission as a key driver of growth. We are highly optimistic, and from a productivity and efficiency standpoint, we are better positioned so that we can continue playing a key role in this line of business.
[Foreign language] É o que eu falei antes.
This planning that I have mentioned is about that.
[Foreign language] Também a gente já comentei pouquinho que a gente quer fazer essa conexão.
To really bridge this gap, like I've mentioned, the connection between what we generate and what is actually consumed.
[Foreign language] Nós vamos ver aqui.
Over time, we will see in the presentation the regional presence of the company. We have different options to actually participate in this process. We have been participating for a while, but we will deep dive into what we have done and still plan to do.
[Foreign language] Na próxima slide aí, a gente fala pouquinho.
Over the next slide, we talk about TAESA's key role in transmission.
[Foreign language] We see that we have super important elements.
There are different components here that really highlight our participation.
[Foreign language] A gente tem alguns sistemas.
We integrate seven plants to the interconnected system. Luis is going to explain the special protection system, which is a great advantage for us to prevent any disruption in the process, and we have been playing a key role in managing this system quite well.
[Foreign language] A gente tem a conexão Brasil-Argentina também.
We have the international connection between Brazil and Argentina through SAÍRA, which is quite strategic for the country. It is exporting energy and eventually importing energy, but this is a key asset for the company. We do the integration with 60 transmission agents. Why does it matter? Because we are present there and we have partners in almost every place where we operate.
[Foreign language] Desenvolvimento.
When we talk about our future outlook and new opportunities, this is quite important to consider.
[Foreign language] A criação de empregos aqui.
We are creating jobs, we have great connections with our customers, and here on the left, we talk about the interconnections that we have in place with the distribution concessionaires we work with. We are serving a broad wide market, and when we see the regional interconnections, it is a sample of our entire presence. We can say that our regional participation in the country is quite important, and it is going to be even more clear when we look into the maps that we are going to present later on. Continuing, we see here how much progress we've made.
[Foreign language] A gente fez aqui no ciclo, pode voltar, por favor.
I just wanted to go back one slide.
[Foreign language] Pode voltar?
One slide, please.
[Foreign language] Isso. Então aqui, eu queria, eu tô falando, mas não apareceu ainda. Pronto.
Okay.
[Foreign language] Então aqui a gente tem uma empresa que se.
Here, what do we see? We see a company that grew sizably since its inception, since 2010.
[Foreign language] Nós temos aí crescimento de.
We see an RAP, an annual permitted revenue, totaling BRL 4.4 million.
[Foreign language] Quase bilhão.
We're talking about a BRL 1.5 billion increase.
[Foreign language] aumento de participação.
This is a sizable increase over time.
[Foreign language] A gente consegue ver, né?
That means that we can see here that we have achieved a 35% additional RAP in the past five years, which is significant. Whenever we talk about growth, you can see that this is what we're talking about. We started way back and we have moved forward. In that sense, maybe we can talk about who we were when we merged and who we have become. The company started through M&A, which is what you see between 2006 and 2015. It was also able to pivot, and starting 2016 and up to 2025, most of our growth came from project implementation.
[Foreign language] Então, ela teve.
Meaning we took part in auctions. You can see how much we have grown, and now we have experience on both sides. We know how to acquire new companies and also how to participate in auctions and develop projects from scratch. This is very important for us when we look back at our history. We started with M&A, but we have also been able to grow through auctions, which is a growth we have made bigger in recent years. Now, moving forward.
[Foreign language] A entrega de valor com crescimento.
We can see how much value we have added through this growth. Here I have a few highlights to share with you. Today, we have almost 1,000 employees.
[Foreign language] We have 400 technicians.
400 of them are field technicians that operate countrywide in more than 300 cities, meaning that we have a large regional footprint. You can see an BRL 11 billion investment in these years, with BRL 14 billion distributed in returns for investors, meaning that our investments have helped the company to grow, which is important for us to highlight. As you can see, when we talk about concessions, we are currently working with 25 concessions, which are directly controlled, and 19 where we have partial control, meaning that totals 44 different concessions, which shows how large our operations are. Of course, there are some regional differences.
In any case, we can say that if you ask us where we operate the most, it's hard for us to say because we are in Southern Brazil, Northern Brazil, Eastern Brazil, and we believe that that's actually one of our strengths because we are a more diverse company through that. If we look forward and we look at our commitment in terms of added value, these are some of the key pillars that guide us, and you will have an opportunity to see more of that when our C-level speaks. I want to show you a little bit more about what we have achieved in our journey. We have been able to bring innovation. Innovation is actually one of the core values for our company right now. Just so you know, our entire team has specific innovation goals. Marcel will be addressing that a bit more.
We changed how we see innovation because this is something that should be helping our business. It is not something that is for scholarly uses only. We want it to drive business results. We have also been able to improve the management of our variable portion. I'm proud to say that we see that across all our regions. We have our electricians who are the people at the front line, and they know what impacts company revenues. They know that when we have an incident, an event, this person has to address it as best as possible through good logistics and resource allocation. Who really makes a difference in raising alerts and asking for resources are precisely those frontline workers, and they are aware of the variable portion that we offer. We see a great curve so far.
We have had good developments throughout the year, and we believe that this remains true in the short-term future. We are confident on where we're heading. Now, moving to the next topic, we have new implementations, and we will be talking more about these undertakings and the stages they are on. We see, of course, changes in terms of scope and interactions with environmental agencies, but in any case, we have been able to achieve great success, and we have a history of great successes as well that we will be sharing with you. Now, reinforcements and improvements. We discussed that a lot. We have to see whether we are reinforcing our lines too much or too little, but we will be talking more about how we can look inward and see the different options we have in terms of upgrades, reinforcements, improvements, either on small or large scale.
This is all possible through enhancements in our processes and controls. Catia will talk more about SAP changes, some upgrades, some changes in our supply chain, what we're doing in terms of our shared services. We are also looking inward so that we can become a future-ready company and an efficient company in that sense. We can also optimize operational costs. When we look at our margin, you can see that we have been able to increase our operational margin recently, given all everything that we have done to drive efficiency, innovation. Of course, there are things that are not 100% under our control, just variable portion, but we are moving well in that direction as well.
There are also things related to some interactions with other players, but we have been successful in our endeavors, and we are now well positioned to transmit energy safely, efficiently, and adding value to our investors. Here, we show you some of the leverages. Oh, sorry, let me go to the next slide. We are here to talk about efficiency and innovation, something we have already touched on, but which is a great leverage to add additional value to our business. We also talk a lot about how maintenance of our current concessions. This is something that makes sense not only for TAESA, but for the entire company, to bring new revenue models, but we know that it is very advantageous to actually maintain concessions that are spread across the country. Also, growth with profitability. We will be talking more about some opportunities and options that are upcoming options, actually.
All of that guided by safety and security, sustainability, and a strong culture that we'll be talking more about today. You know what we talk about when we talk about culture. These were some of the things that I wanted to highlight. Of course, if I had time, I could spend 20 or 30 more minutes just telling you the things that we are proud to have achieved this year. I will be wrapping up for now. We will have our roundtables later and the discussion with our leaders. I want to thank you for your time, and I'm happy to continue this conversation. Thank you so very much.
[Foreign language] Obrigado, Thiago. Grande início aqui em termos de temas que vão ser abordados.
That was great because these opening remarks showed a lot of what we'll be touching on throughout this morning. Now we will be actually in our dynamic roundtables. We will be discussing all these topics as well. For our next panel, Leadership in Focus, I invite our leaders to the stage. We're just making some microphone adjustments. With that, I invite to the stage Catia Pereira, our Chief of Innovation and Investor Relations, Mauricio, our Chief of Business, Rinaldo Pecchio , our President, Jell Lima, our Chief of Implementation, and Luis, our Chief of Technical Operations. We asked what were some of the topics that you would like to have covered in this event. The results are now shown in this word cloud. These are topics that we often discuss with you, but the idea is to have a really open conversation, a two-way conversation.
I know that you'll have questions, so please write your questions down, those of you who are with us in person, those of you who are with us remotely, because we will be answering all your questions in the second part of this conversation. First, the leaders will be discussing among them based on the topics that we have selected. As you usually see in our events, we are going to have a room let choosing the topics that will be discussed. All the topics that can be chosen from are among the ones that were most upvoted by you, our investors.
[Foreign language] Bem, o primeiro tema é...
Okay, the first topic is ongoing implementation projects.
[Foreign language] Alguns foram entregues mais recentemente.
We know that some have already been completed, but there are always others that are still ongoing. Let's start with Jell, who will be telling us more about our current project.
Thank you, Cristiano . Good morning. I want to say good morning to all my colleagues here and to our audience, both in person and online. When we talk about project implementation, this is incredibly important for TAESA. Based on the chart that you saw earlier, you can see that in the past 10 years, 86% of TAESA's growth came from new undertakings. Let me share a bit more about that with you. Of course, we have to show you the commitment that TAESA has in terms of energy development in Brazil. Currently, when we look at our undertakings, we have 11 projects that are under implementation now. We have already energized three of them earlier this year.
We've completed our capacitor bank in the Novat rans concession in the state of Tocantins and Maranhão. In June, on the 15th of June, more specifically, we energized the Pitiguari project in the state of Santa Catarina. More recently, on the 7th of September, we have been able to energize the PSM substation at [Mons do Dourado]. All of these investments represent BRL 4.1 billion in CAPEX, out of which we have already spent BRL 3.5 billion, meaning we have a backlog of BRL 1.6 billion that will help us to implement and complete the other eight projects. This means an additional RAP of more than BRL 600 million, of which BRL 212 million have already been added to our portfolio, given the undertakings that have already been energized.
Just so we know a bit more about TAESA numbers, because of course we talk a lot about our undertakings, but I think we can translate them into more tangible numbers. We're talking about almost 11,000 km of cables that have been brought to these new undertakings, and more than 14... Oh, sorry. We're talking about 3,800 people working in the field in our current implementation projects. Out of the eight projects that are still being implemented, with the exception of one, Juduá, which we have been recently granted, all others are in a construction phase, which requires us to coordinate all these projects, to manage all these projects, and TAESA is ready to do that with excellence. In the next slide, I wanted to show you some of the projects that we are currently developing. These are the largest that we have at present. The first one is Ananaí.
Ananaí is in the states of Paraná and São Paulo, so it's divided between these two states, and it connects the AC substation in southern São Paulo with the Ponta Grossa substation in Paraná, representing a 275 KM line. Another one connects Pataias to Chivalache, and the goal here at Ananaí, which is the largest project that we got from an auction at TAESA. It represents BRL 1.75 billion in investments, and we are now in advanced stages. We believe that the project will be completed in mid-2026 before the annual deadline, and it is one of the most important projects for TAESA right now when we talk about our implementation. Now, moving on to the second project, I'd also like to share with you the Tangará project. Here again, we see how broad our operations are in terms of our different assets, because we have Ananaí in Paraná and São Paulo.
Tangará is a project that connects Maranhão and Pará. Here again, we're talking about two different transmission lines, and we will be implementing another synchronous compensator. It's the second that we bring to Brazil. It will help us to control both tension and frequency. We will see this equipment being used more and more often, given how energy generation is developing in the country, which leads to the need to install that piece of equipment. Tangará is also in more advanced stages of implementation. We hope that in early next year, this project will be fully operational, and that will represent a two-year anticipation. We will finish the project two years ahead of what was established in our agreement with ANEEL. Last but not least, let me tell you more about SAÍRA.
SAÍRA is an incredibly important project for us, and Luis will be telling you more about it later, because this is a project that actually is basically a retrofit of an HVDC project. We will be converting the current that is currently at 60 hz in Brazil into 50 hz so that it can be exported to Argentina. The energy can be exported to Argentina. This is what we usually call a back-to-back project, because we can also import energy from Argentina through the transmission line. We know that during the winter, we exported a lot of energy to Argentina, but now we are going through a dry spell in Brazil, and before the rainfalls help us to get more hydropower in Brazil, we can import energy from Argentina.
So, we are actually conducting the retrofit of this line, meaning that we will be looking at the core of the project, the electronics. More than 6,000 electronic components that need replacement in this project. We can therefore import and export 2.2 GW. That is the capacity of that transmission line and the amount of energy that can be transmitted between the two countries. I don't know, Luis, if you want to add something to what I have already said.
Yes, thank you. As you mentioned, SAÍRA is one of the most recent assets that we acquired in an auction in December 2022. In 90 days, we were able to implement the incorporation of this asset in our operations, and we have it operating 24/7, given it is very strategic because it connects Brazil to Argentina. We have a local operational center, a hub that coordinates that project.
Later, we'll be talking more about how important it is for us here in Brazil, because it's the only source of interconnection between Brazil and Argentina, meaning that TAESA is responsible for maintaining and operating this asset, which is crucial for Argentina as well, because it's the only connection in the energy grid between Argentina and Brazil. We can talk more about that later.
Thank you, Luis. With that, I hand it over back to you.
Okay, thank you, Jell. Okay, moving on to the next topic. I think this was a great warm-up, but let's go to a real light again so that we can see what the next topic will be.
ANEEL auctions. This is obviously one of the topics that would be among the most upvoted, because this is, we have some upcoming auctions.
This is something that is a hot topic right now and is important for our company's growth. It's important for us to maybe broaden the discussion and talk about profitable growth opportunities for TAESA and our industry. Maybe we can discuss that now.
Thank you, Cristiano. Thank you, everyone, all the leaders with me and this panel, but everyone that has joined us here today, and those of you who are attending remotely. Thank you so much for being here and for hearing us out. I think that we have a great opportunity here to talk about growth opportunities based on profitability. João shared some of the opportunities we've had over these past years. We still have some projects under implementation. We've delivered and completed some projects. What about the future? What's the outlook? We have other opportunities in this growth avenue in terms of profitability.
You know that the transmission industry is quite centralized. We have ANEEL, together with ONS, that is an agency, and other players in the energy industry. This is how it works. We've seen the [PATCalp], that is a major document with all the projects that are in a more mature stage, whose technical studies have been completed and approved. This document that was published in August puts forward about BRL 40 million, bringing together investments that will be made through approvals, investments that will be made through new binding processes. We see these projects throughout Brazil, so we do understand that we need to reinforce and expand the transmission network in Brazil and the five regions of Brazil.
In addition, in the latest updates of this document, we've seen a trend of a quantitative expansion, so more new transmission lines, new substations, new opportunities to transformations, but also what I would see as a qualitative transformation, increasingly more digital equipment to ensure safety, security, or the reliability of the system. For example, the synchronous condenser. We have some really sophisticated equipment and SAÍRA equipment that increases our efficiency. With all that, we in the energy industry are working hard to keep meeting the demands of this market that is quite dynamic. We expect green nitrogen, electrification of industrial processes, and other topics that probably are the future of our society.
When we talk about these BRL 40 million, we are talking about these more mature projects, and we have other studies that are ongoing, and some of them should be completed in the end of this year, and some of them TAESA is directly participating. When we talk about this pipeline or backlog of projects, it has the potential to grow. Considering that, we have many auctions ahead and great opportunities to continue growing as a company, delivering profitability and producing great results for our shareholders. In addition, I'd like to share with you that last week we had the publication of the next call for tender for the next auction with the proper conditions to participate in this auction. It is worth mentioning that we already have mapped out auctions for next year. We have one auction expected in February 2026 and one in October 2026.
Moreover, we've been following a discussion on auctions that is stored at LRCAPI, which is a way to store a capacitor reserve. We have had some forms of that auction in Brazil, but based on that, we are working on the role for these storage systems. Here again, we see this trend of expansion not only from a quantitative, but also from a qualitative standpoint. We have also large batteries that are under discussion to allow for greater stability of the systems. Depending on how these rules are established, these can be good opportunities for the company to participate in and to continue growing. We are definitely going to map all the opportunities and analyze what makes sense for the company. Talking about the auction that is expected to happen on the 31st of next month, we have seven projects that have been selected by ANEEL.
We had some additional projects that have been postponed for next year, but these seven projects intend to construct about 900 km of line, over 2,000 MVA of power installed. Most lots are quite complex in terms of reactive power, which really confirms that the system really needs these types of equipment. This system, when we talk about the need, it's quite immediate. All this equipment needs to be energized as fast as possible. When we talk about geographic characteristics, for TAESA, it's very complicated to really define a culture. We're quite a diverse company, and even in this auction, we see projects throughout Brazil and across Brazil. We consider that we have great opportunities ahead that are really in line with our line of business and how we operate. The first auction of 2026, these are some of the projects that are in public consultation stage.
There's some uncertainty on what will be in the binding process, but we see that there will be sophisticated equipment and these projects across the country. We are still monitoring that. Up to this point, we talked about a growth pillar based on auctions. If we look into the past years, we've also grown through reinforcements and improvements. We have been granted different approvals, and we improved our operational efficiency, but also were able to deliver great returns for our stakeholders and shareholders because of that. The company is always ready to improve its own service and to invest additional money if needed. Some of these opportunities of these reinforcements and improvements are just as great as some auctions. We call them a large-scale project. In addition, we have some different investments that are a wide range, and we call them a small-sized project.
I don't know if Luis or Jell are going to give us an insight on how we've positioned in that.
Thank you, Mauricio, for talking about reinforcements. In my case, we're talking about the large-sized projects and reinforcements. Just like you said, the results are quite similar to what we have and the auctions and the returns that can be produced. It depends on the implementation time and also on how broad it is from a systemic standpoint. It requires interaction with ANEEL and other government agencies so that we can allow the projects to happen. We can put forward some of these projects, and we can talk to them to together put forward these projects. Talking about some of these reinforcements that are under implementation, we have the ATE, we have the ATE3. We have some opportunities to talk more about these projects when we talk about innovation.
ATE3 is located in the state of Pará, in Tacarinas, and we have a reactor bank installed. We have some reinforcements and improvements in São Pedro. We have the substation of Barreiras in the state of Bahia. We have an autotransformer bank in the substation of Rio Grande too. In addition to these under implementation projects, we've mentioned an additional RAP of BRL 37.1 million over the next 12 months to September 2026. We've also identified other opportunities which are being negotiated. We are in a phase of technical defense with ONS and government agencies, for example, to continue the retrofit. It's going to be a large-scale reinforcement. We are also going to improve some transmission lines, for example, from Assis to Londrina, where we have the possibility to increase the transmission power of the line.
Additional opportunities to install equipment like reactors and transformers are in advanced stages, but I think Luis can mention some of the other reinforcements.
Yes, I'm going to be brief, but when we talk about small-sized reinforcements, it's sort of a retail when we talk about everything that is installed. We tend to increase reliability of equipment whenever it surpasses its operation capacity or its replacement due to a life cycle. We do monitor any and all equipment, and based on that, based on our program, we can map out our reinforcement improvements from 2025 onward.
You will be able to ask questions in our next session, but now I think we could go to a new topic. Wow, innovation has been picked by our roulette. I think this is quite a trending topic. The whole world is talking about new technology. Innovation is a much broader topic, though.
We have explored this topic in each and every department of our company. I'll talk to our Chief Business and Innovation Officer. Mauricio, what is innovation from TAESA's standpoint?
I don't want to be the only one talking, but when we talk about innovation, this is something I love talking about. Thank you, everyone who voted on that as a key topic. Innovation is not a goal per se. It is a tool to achieve the business goals and really following the company's strategy. One of our focuses is on innovation so that we can increase efficiency as a whole. This year, we have revisited our innovation program, and we were inspired by the venture client concept.
Considering being a strategic customer that implements efficient solutions, that's going to reap the rewards of efficient solutions, but can also be in the venture building world and also in the venture capital concept when we talk about smart investments that are quite safe from a financial standpoint. We've launched TAESA Ventures, that's an open innovation program that fosters participation. We are creating partnerships with the university, research institutions, and startups. We invest in the money in a program that is coordinated by the regulatory agency, but we also look for other investors that may be interested in co-developing projects with the company. Based on that, we've defined six fronts for us to tackle. We see challenges in project implementation so we can have more interesting solutions, new equipment to make it faster, more efficient.
Another one is to be ready for the world, so sensoring and acquisition and transmission and treatment of information. When we talk about that, we have control over our data, but based on that, we can also invest in automation. Some decisions being made by virtual or autonomous smart agents algorithm working for us, and also robotization. We are a company whose critical missions, depending on the case, could use robotization to make our lives easier and to really facilitate the operation. We could also increase reliability of some of the equipment and operations and have some other additional business that are complementary to what we do today, like e-mobility. For that, like I said, we have this open program and we publish to the ecosystem that work with us. We've currently published 16 challenges. You can find them, for example, on TAESA's LinkedIn profile.
We've had a really positive response. We've received answers every day, and we've received proposals, and it's quite a challenge to define which of those are top priorities for us. Just for you to have an idea, we've had a pitch day a few months ago. We brought together over 400 employees. We have about 1,000 in the company, so 40% of that were brought together in this program. We had all the departments putting forward proposals to review processes, to increase efficiencies on a daily basis, depending, of course, on your scope of work. That's something we've been working on. Just to recap, we've launched TAESA Ventures, like I've said, that is focused on increasing our business efficiency based on these six territories, focused on creating value, a collaborative program, depending on partnerships, and really addressing real challenges. We are really happy.
We've recently been awarded by ANEEL, one of the most valuable companies in the energy industry. We have been also recognized as one of the most innovative companies in the energy industry in Brazil. Our innovation company, I think it's worth mentioning, is not exclusive of one department. This is a company initiative. Some people are, of course, more engaged, but it is a company-wide initiative. Jell, Luis, Catia , I think that we've all been on board, and I think innovation really goes beyond our teams.
Thank you so much, Mauricio. That was excellent. Like I said, all these topics, like innovation, this goes really across our company. I think that each and all of you could really address innovation to tell us how you've worked toward innovation.
Thank you.
To start, when we talk about implementation, like Mauricio said, we can be really creative in our work, and we can explore the threshold of technology. This case here was in the reinforcement we had in Assis. We've installed an underground cabling system. Here what we have, Assis, is a substation that is a strategic hub for us. It connects the state of Paraná and distributes energy to the metropolitan region of Curitiba, and there is also a connection to the southeastern region of Brazil. Our challenge, if you could go back to the previous slide, please. The challenge was the reinforcement and to install a transformer bank, which is quite a large-sized project. That is an innovation per se, but there was also a limitation. It had its own capacity. Using our creativity and expertise, we found an alternative solution to make it viable.
This is what we see if we compare the original project versus what we executed. There is a difference there in terms of the footprint. We found a solution that was quite different. We have transmitted energy using underground cables of 525 kilovolts. That required our team to interact with ONS, ANEEL, to make it viable. It allowed us to implement this reinforcement. That's what we see here in this slide. The underground cables allow us, as you can see from the pictures, to improve operations. These ones were manufactured in China. The provider actually operates in Brazil, so these cables are available in the Brazilian market, and we are now preparing our infrastructure to bring the cables into our operations. Here you see some important information about it.
It's not a long stretch, 2.4 km, but each cable has a 15 cm diameter, and it has to take a 3,000-ampere current, which is very high. It can get up to 3,000 amperes. Not only that, but we're also connecting a transformer, actually a transformer bank, which is currently one of the largest in Brazil when we think about auto-net current. This is a transformer bank that is shown on the pictures. As you can see, it takes almost half of the size of the room where we're at now, and we have actually three transformers, one for each phase, and it weighs 288 metric tons. The first one is now being shipped. It is getting to the Assis substation, and I think it will get to the substation mid-next year, but that required innovation, creativity, and investigating alternatives to make this project feasible.
I think Luis has something to add in the sense of innovation.
Yeah, sure. Innovation is the foundation for efficient maintenance. When you talk about efficient maintenance, it's important for us to have good controls and monitoring. TAESA today offers 99% of monitoring service for its assets. We're talking about more than 2,000 pieces of equipment under monitoring, collecting 15,000 data points every day in terms of electrical, physical characteristics, temperature, and many other measurements. This is something we started in 2017. What does that mean? I have historical data for our equipment, which allows us to assess the physical integrity of that equipment to then make decisions of which piece of equipment needs to be replaced or maintained, and even adjusted. Here, see the importance of monitoring when we look at climate change.
In the past few years, we have seen a larger number of wildfires, especially in northeastern Brazil. We were talking about that, right, Pacho? On Sunday, we had 80 wildfires blazing under our transmission lines. We're talking about lines that connected different regions, meaning that we have to be very accurate on where we should act. Of course, we also have to look at the environmental responsibility on our sites. We have licenses for trimming vegetation whenever needed, but we have to know when and where to act. We're looking at how large our transmission lines are. We now have developed a tool which we call a heat map, where we see the hotspots and we can assess the vegetation under that area and when I should be trimming vegetation or suppressing vegetation. We have also innovated in a second way. We are installing cameras.
Can I get back to the previous slide? We're not moving to this one now. We're also installing cameras across our transmission lines to monitor these hotspots. We have some cameras that have already been added into critical areas where these hotspots are most frequent. We can check two kilometers in front and behind that camera, meaning that I can check 12 towers with a single camera, giving me great visibility in a 360 angle, meaning that I can act early. This is true both for our central hub and our local teams who have to act whenever we see larger hotspots. Here, we have some important items when it comes to innovation. On the first video, you see a drone inspection. Two, three years ago, how did we inspect our sites? By actually climbing the tower.
Look at how much faster it is to do it with a drone, which carries a camera to check the isolator. The drone can also go closer to the isolator, which is not true for the team that used to climb each tower to inspect it. Not only have we had efficiency gains and reduced times, our team is also safer now. Our team is well trained to now operate drones so that we can monitor our towers. Now, on the right, you can see some cameras installed in our substations, helping our operational hub. Here, you can see, for example, that we are actually adjusting key checking for oil levels. Now we can do all of that remotely. In our central hub in Rio de Janeiro, we can oversee activities in Brasília, which is kilometers away.
This makes our operations more reliable, and it also helps us to make better decisions. Still on the topic of innovation, we have to always talk about our Operation Control Center, where we have brought technology to bring efficiency and make our transmission lines more reliable with tools that help us to make quick decisions. Whenever we see any transmission line going down for over one minute, we know that that would lead to changes in our variable portion. We have only one minute to get the energy back up in our systems. If we do not have smart technology and embedded technologies, we wouldn't be able to do that. As I showed you, even with hotspots, if after one minute of downtime, that would affect our variable portion. Now we can address that early.
This is something that also makes our team safer, and we have better ergonomics to offer them. Innovation is the foundation of efficient maintenance and operations.
That was great, thank you. We also have innovation being brought to finance and technology. Maybe Catia could address that a bit for us, because that is under your umbrella, right?
Hi, Cristiano. It's a pleasure to be here with you, both of you, with us in person or remotely. It's a pleasure to share this panel with other leaders. We're here to talk about technology. We know that technology is indeed a flagship for us here at TAESA, and basically it means translating innovation into tangible business results. We have more than 40 different technological projects being developed now.
The idea here is for us to look at technology as a way to become more efficient, to streamline operations, to have safer operations, and more scalable operations. That's what we strive for. The pitch that you saw on TAESA Ventures are now being addressed in the sense of how can we structure them through a system architecture that makes sense and that is scalable, efficient, and cost-effective, because as you have seen, our company has grown a lot through both M&As and greenfield projects. Now we have to make sure that this is an efficient structure and that every time we grow, every step we take in terms of new investments, it helps us to keep good margins and even grow our margins. We have also looked at data governance. More recently, in August, we upgraded our SAP system.
This is indeed a game changer because it brings important features to our department so that we can look at operations end to end and we can therefore streamline our operations, because this is the time for us to make our operations more streamlined, efficient, and standardized, because this all boils down to efficiency. That brings great opportunities for us to automate our operations as well, because when we talk about innovation, we think about disruption, but innovation is something that is part of our everyday routines, our DNA. We have to make sure our teams are able to look at their daily tasks differently. We are now bringing a new data governance operations and services so that we can structure our data with the help of the tech team to make sure that this data is under good governance.
As Luis mentioned, all that data needs to be structured to generate insights for better decisions. We will be structuring that data to make sure that it is ready to be used by operations, implementation teams, and the company as a whole. As Luis mentioned, the monitoring is helping us with predictive maintenance. This is something that is now at the palm of the hand of our local teams, and we can also use that for geo-referencing to help us identify new projects and opportunities, risks whenever we study new options. We are actually building a data culture for our company as well, so that data, when structured, can be used by all our teams so they become more autonomous in managing their own areas and making their own decisions.
Here we have our COE, our Center of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Hyperautomation, meaning that IT should not be the only one developing solutions. We should instead build a culture that upskills our teams so they are ready not only to read data, but also to develop their own small automations. Of course, that requires governance from the IT team, and this is something that would make our company more flexible. Another important topic, and [Alson] will be talking about that, he is our tech expert. I think it is important for us to look not only at our challenges, but how to also bring all that to the company with data security in mind. We have to make sure that everything that we do in terms of innovation is supported by IT, by tech, and in a way that is fully secure.
Good morning, everyone.
I want to thank you for joining us both in person and remotely. I'm here to tell you more about what we are doing in terms of tech transformation in our company. Catia has showed us some of the important pillars that guide us, and I want to go back to one that she mentioned, which is our architecture. Our architecture is crucial for us. Here at TAESA, IT is a strategic department for the entire company, and that means that we have to also add value to the business. Catia is always asking me about that. How am I creating value? I'll say one thing that Mauricio has already touched on. When talking about innovation, to now talk about IT. IT is not an end in and of itself. It's here to add value to the business. Many different departments talked about data, right?
One of our greatest challenges now is to handle all the data and to bring good governance to it. We have talked about sensor data and maintenance data, and we have data coming from all different departments, especially now with the digitalization of our substations and some digital stations, fully digital stations. The number of data that is being collected grows exponentially. Governance, therefore, is incredibly important because data is a hot topic across the globe, and that is also true here at TAESA. This is something we're looking at when looking at innovation. We want to make sure that data is available to other teams to make better and more agile decisions, but also for us to be able to manage the data and make it help the business achieve its goal. Of course, that requires cybersecurity.
Security is a core value for us, just like safety is for our team. Cybersecurity is what will make sure our revenue is safe and that the services we provide to society more broadly are reliable. We are now part of the Cyber Guardians, which is a cybersecurity exercise, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. This year, we had 20 countries taking part in this initiative and 160 institutions, including armed forces, regulatory bodies, in our case ANEEL, but we also had regulatory bodies and agencies from other industries. TAESA took part in this effort with other companies in the energy industry, but we also had people in the transportation industry and others. What is the point of that exercise? Given the environment where we are, where we offer critical services to the country, we have to make sure that our services remain profitable.
Cybersecurity is not only crucial, but it has to be ensured. We wanted to make sure that all the companies that could actually bring Brazil's infrastructure down are secure, and we made sure that TAESA is compliant with the best practices in terms of cybersecurity as seen across the globe. We also had to understand how to defend our operations. We know that many people take part in that, many players, including military forces, regulatory agencies, and private companies. This exercise allowed us to understand the importance of coordinating efforts across these players to make sure that a company like ours providing crucial services to the population needs to be protected.
With that, I hand it over to Cristiano. Thank you. I want to thank our leaders.
I think there is a lot going on in our company right now, and we cannot talk about innovation without also touching on operational efficiency because these two things walk hand in hand, and it is actually the main topic of today's event. With that, I hand it over to Luis so he can tell us more about how he sees that.
As I mentioned, innovation and operational efficiency walk hand in hand, and it's important for us to deep dive into that. Before we go into the topic of efficiency, can you tell us more about the importance of TAESA for Brazil?
It is important because I think that will then help us better understand how efficiency plays a role here as well.
Yeah, that's perfect, Cristiano.
As you have already mentioned, TAESA, and this is something actually that Catia also touched on earlier, TAESA operates across the country in all regions. What is our footprint? When we look at these headlines, we are the third largest concessionary in terms of transmission lines. We operate in all five Brazilian regions. We have more than 15,000 kilometers of transmission lines and 10,000 of those in 500 kilovolts. That is important because these are used for larger distances, meaning that our interstate connection, meaning the assets that connect to different states, especially considering that we cover 10,000 km, shows the role that TAESA has for the country. We also have an important role in stabilizing the interconnected system, making sure that the system is resilient and can be used now that we have renewable energy coming into the grid.
We have four static compensators, 112 reactor banks that control the tension levels, and 12 capacitor banks. We have also implemented the largest SCP in the country, and I'll tell you more about that in future slides so you know what SCP is all about. As we mentioned before, TAESA connects all five Brazilian regions. There are interesting numbers here. If you look at the connection between northeast and southeast Brazil, we are actually transmitting 4 gigawatts, serving 16 million people. The connection between north and northeast, 10 million people. You can see that we operate the only connection between Brazil and Argentina, 2.2 GW, representing more than 8 million people served by the energy we send them. We play a strategic role when transmitting large amounts of energy, especially between different states.
In the next slide, we see another important characteristic of TAESA, which are the connections between our different assets. When you look at the map, we have assets in southern, southeastern Brazil, northern Brazil, that are all interconnected. As I mentioned, we are also connected to Argentina. We are the only company with an asset that connects the energy grids between Brazil and Argentina, which has truly helped our energy exports to Argentina, and is also a reserve capacity. We're talking about 2.2 GW of energy can be imported from Argentina whenever we need and if we ever face a problem in our own system. I'm talking about the special protection. What is the special protection?
If we can imagine this interconnected system with the different transmission players, electrically connected but acting independently and coordinated by ONS. If one of these players or agents comes to failure, then we could have the risk of a blackout depending on the situation. ONS created this special protection system named SEP, probably one of the best projects that has been implemented recently since it prioritizes data connection among different transmission agents. Like we can see here, we have the interconnection with over 15 agents. We connect 13 substations, 30 transmission lines, and two HVDC systems. ONS chose TAESA as the major coordinator to implement this SEP and also to help in the monitoring of the system. It allows for, depending on the event, once this is monitored, it's going to shut down a source or a voltage or a power. We increase the transmission capacity as a load.
We are talking about operation reliability. This is a key tool to increase operational security, and we are able to increase the transportation of 1,000 MW of renewable energy. It plays a key role since it allows for greater renewable energy protection, since it has an automated protection system that prevents any losses if we have an overload of renewable energy, and it is going to act strategically to prevent any waste from happening. We've been working together with ONS for over a year, and this has been working well. What about SAÍRA? This is an asset that connects Argentina with Brazil. Like I've mentioned, this is the only interconnection point and represents a 2.2 GW interconnection capacity. It serves about 8 million people. It's a back-to-back installation. It converts 60 hz, like we mentioned, to 50. That is the Argentinian system.
It was impossible to have a direct connection with these different hz. We needed to adjust this frequency according to the Argentinian standards.
Cristiano, if we see TAESA's role within the transmission energy, we are in a highly strategic place, and we are quite relevant either due to the kilometers of transmission lines to SAÍRA. I think there's a video to talk about that, right?
Yes.
443 km of transmission lines, 525 kilovolts in the Brazilian territory, four hubs of conversion of frequency, HVDC technology converting 60- 50 hz, capacity to serve approximately 20.4% of the annual consumption and 3.8% of the total annual consumption of SIN. We optimize the energy provision, promoting efficiency and sustainability. Two conversion blocks of 1.1 GW are able to meet the demand of approximately 6.2 million people.
Cristiano , just to add to that, when we talk about innovation, this is a drone operated by our team. We had the operation ongoing, and this drone flew over these energized areas, and we see how helpful it is. We have this oversight, and we can really identify any leakage or any problems with the transformers. In the past, we had to shut down this piece of equipment, but now, with the operation running using a drone, we can really have this type of oversight and real-time monitoring.
We talked about how broad our operation is, but I think that now it's important also to talk about efficiency.
To start addressing this topic, when we talk about efficiency and connecting that with the idea of how broad our operation is, we really need to look into our assets. Here we created a name that is a super function of transmission. We have many, many different transmission functions. We have a transformer, for example, which is quite different from a different one you have today. When we analyzed all these functions, we understood that about 8% of those account for over 52% of our revenue. So, 21 transmission functions account for 52% of our operational revenue. What does that mean then? First, it is really in line with what we talked previously. We have strategic installations across the country.
We have these lines that produce good revenue with great equipment installed. In addition, we've devoted certain attention to these key assets since it has a variable proportion that is quite high. Any piece of equipment in a transmission piece of equipment, if it is shut down, the variable proportion is times 150 the amount of the revenue. I need to map out these assets so that I can map out how to optimize the operation if I need to restart the operation. It also helps to prioritize maintenance. When we talk about costs, it's important to see what we've done to optimize costs. Based on what we've seen, we have specific plans for each transmission line, so power restoration plans, to try to also innovate when we are restoring systems in transmission lines. This is an innovation we've established in restoring a transmission line here.
We are trying to not use a crane to lift the cables of a circuit. We're talking about 8- 10 metric tons of cables, and we would need cranes. They can only move at 60 km per hour, so it would take a crane to get there about 10 hours. What we've been doing and we've innovated is to use a hoisting machine powered by combustion systems. We are hoisting that, not using a crane, and we've been studying how we can optimize operations applying this new solution if something happens. We are trying to really implement faster and more efficient solutions. Continuing our cost optimization initiatives, we have started implementing overnight maintenance. Oh, but is that possible? Pecky has sometimes come to us with these new challenges, and why not? It is really doable, and it serves our purpose well.
For us, it's really complicated to shut down an asset or to just stop it from working. I can't just stop the operations during the week and business days. We used to do that on weekends. Considering the migration of consumption and power, it was nearly impossible to do that over weekends. We planned this shutdown, and then it did not happen. It was denied. ONS did not allow us to do that due to the systemic conditions. We started doing these interventions overnight during the week. We have the lowest load, about zero unavailability, so any zero downtime, and ONS has started approving our interventions so that we could have our maintenance plan as expected, but also reducing the overtime paid when we had to do that over weekends. It was a solution that quite suited our operation.
In addition, when we talk about operational excellence, we have the PMSO that are basically operational costs that are key in our industry. When we revisited our structure, we had eight management teams, and we've restructured our corporate structure, keeping our wide scope of work, but we've streamlined that to four management teams, increasing synergy across regions. We are going to give you further details of that later on. In addition, Mauricio mentioned reinforcements and improvements, and we were quite modest in terms of small reinforcements and improvements. This allows us to increase reliability of the system and also produce new revenues for the company. We've created a program where we identified an edge installation opportunity based on the procedures in place to increase operational reliability in addition to increase revenue and or find new sources of revenue.
Between 2020 and 2024, we've had 33 small-sized reinforcements, and in 2025, on July 31, we've ended the timeline. We have applied for different reinforcements, and we are waiting for ONS to approve so that we can start execution early next year. These reinforcements are a new source of revenue, and they are going to be additional revenues next year. When we talk also about operational efficiency, there are some things that should be mentioned. We've restructured our operational leadership. We've reorganized our regional structure according to our domestic footprint. We have these maintenance hubs. We've redistributed the assets depending on the transmission roles it plays and where we should have our team located, where we needed vehicles and where we needed our teams really according to how strategic our assets were. We have also prioritized our CapEx considering the condition of the pieces of equipment.
We've optimized our OpEx, reevaluated our logistics, and the allocation throughout our states, focusing on increasing our efficiency. In addition to centralizing our planning, today any and all planning of our activities and all the programming is centralized in Rio de Janeiro. Based on that, I have a big picture of what TAESA is doing, especially when I talk about resource allocation or a scheduled maintenance just to optimize our planning. In addition, I talked about predictive monitoring, and it really helps us on a maintenance front because we can really monitor the pieces of equipment, allowing me to keep the integrity of our equipment. I follow really the warranty and the scheduled maintenance according to our regulatory agency. In a transmission line, for example, we have six years from time to time to really execute the scheduled maintenance.
When we have real-time and ongoing monitoring, I can reevaluate when to execute this maintenance. We've also outlined specific execution goals for everyone. When we talk about a variable proportion, like Pecchio said, we have 0.42% so far. When we look into the first half of the year, we've been gearing efforts into continuing to reduce this. If we consider the market, this is one of the best rates of the market. In addition to that, we have availability of the system. Our today is 99.94%. That is also one of the highest of the sector. We are outperforming the market whose average is 99%. We've been acting really well in terms of optimizing OpEx, prioritizing CapEx, and properly allocating our teams and resources, trying to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency, especially when we consider variable proportion and availability.
Yes, when we talk about operational efficiency, I think it's really important for us to understand what we do behind the scenes to make it happen. I'm going to turn over to Jell and Catia to let us know what they do on that front as well.
Thank you, Cristiano. I wanted to talk about efficiency in project implementation, talking about a methodology that we've been implementing that is the lean construction. It was created by Toyota as the lean manufacturing, but we've applied that in our construction concept. A project per se needs efficiency in its implementation. It will be a project over time. We have a deliverable predefined, and we have limited resources to make it happen. Thus, we are always looking for efficiency.
Lean construction is key for us to meet TAESA's demands in terms of control, in terms of properly implementing its resources, but also to meet the demands of our EPC players or contractors. We are reducing waste and increasing the feasibility of our projects. Lean construction, that is this concept, it's not rocket science. It's something that we can apply on our daily basis, on our daily work. There are some things that can be applied. Check in and check out. In the beginning of the day, you compare, you write down what you want to do, and you compare that at the end of the day with what you have actually done. It's pretty much defining how you're going to operate and where you're going to stop waste from happening.
Another important thing is you need to have a six-week production model, knowing what you will be doing 45 days from now and what you have to prepare today for that project, maybe in terms of access to that local or any licenses you might need, even access to the site. That has to be taken into consideration whenever you plan a project, which also reduces the need to bring people in last minute or to do things that are not yet ready for action, making the life of our EPC workers easier. That improves cooperation because we want this to be a win-win situation for everyone to reduce the number of complaints and anything that is unwelcomed in an operation, let's say.
That was great. Catia, would you like to bring your own topics in that discussion?
Yeah, sure. Let me tell you what is under my team.
Because when we talk about operational efficiency, we can talk about how we restructured our operations because this is where we were able to create shared services to reduce costs and to accelerate our performance and make our company more productive. Also bringing more experts into the role. We started mapping shared services last year. This was implemented this year. We could say now that, usually when we look at shared services, we have three stages. One, for centralization. These services have been centralized. We are now moving into the second stage where we'll be managing processes and truly transforming those processes into a new model. As I streamline, standardize, and transform those processes, we can improve efficiency overall. This is done in tandem with the SAP upgrade.
We have to look at our system and see how we can improve it based on the new features that are now available to us. At another moment in time, we have to look at what we can also automate. We are currently at the second stage. What we expect until early next year is to achieve our best-in-class operations where we see our costs going down, and our customer experience going up. Here by customers, we mean internal customers. Basically, we have to start with visibility and control. When operations are decentralized, it's hard for you to see what's going on. For example, payables require us to be able to look at accountancy, accounts to pay, as our payables are receivables. When we can measure everything in a single place, it's easier for us to find opportunities to make our operations more efficient.
We also take from the frontlines activities that are not part of their core businesses. Now these teams can focus on the core business and shared services absorb the support services they need. The idea of the CSC team is to identify opportunities for us to grow and to create even more value for our company. When we centralize and standardize and streamline and automate our services, we can also operate at a higher scale and we can create new leverages for growth. When we think about new greenfield operations, for example, we usually think about a support structure. Now, given that we have achieved excellent operational levels, I can absorb activities from new ventures. I can help the company grow even further without bringing in additional costs, making TAESA more competitive in options.
Of course, there's a limit to scale, but that is something to be considered. We are also working towards better customer experience. Having shared services helps the front areas at the edge to better operate because now you can have your problem solved faster. Usually when you have to do that by yourself, maybe you can do things fast but not efficiently. We are therefore listening to feedback because we want to be invisible. You know, I want to give them the results they would get from doing that by themselves, but in a way that is more efficient for the entire company. Standardization is also very important. When you think about shared services, we also see that efficiency can be gained in up to 25% just with new opportunities. As I mentioned, this shared services team also helps me to help my supply chains. Why is that?
The CSC team is also managing small value procurement services so that we can make the operational team more agile, and we can move faster with our implementation projects. The CSC team will also be overlooking those activities. In our transformation agenda, where we are trying to become more efficient, we look at the supply chain more broadly and how it can play a more strategic role. Of course, compliance continues to be a core value for us and time to service as well. Now we want to bring efficiency and sustainable results through those services. What do I mean by that?
We want the supply chain to be true business partners, talking about technical topics with implementation teams, talking about technical topics with operational teams so that we can create a diverse portfolio of vendors and find new supply chains, new innovation avenues, and really provoke the discussion on how we can innovate while also mitigating risk. We have to be able to map our risks and see what opportunities are out there and how we can really address them. I think risk mitigation is an important part of a robust supply chain portfolio. The last thing I wanted to mention in that sense is planning. We usually say that if we can plan ahead, we can have better procurement services at lower costs and scaling our operations. I believe that promoting better planning in partnership with the business areas is important.
That is also something that helps us with our stock. Given our footprint, it is important for us to have what we need when we need it without an exceeding stock or too little stock. That helps us with our working capital. It's also important for us to be true partners with the finance team and looking at tax costs that we have so that we can plan our procurement in a way that truly reduces costs and takes advantage of tax benefits.
Last but not least, we have to look at those vendors with ESG in mind, thinking about approving vendors that can help us to achieve that third level of our scope so that we are not only sustainable in our operations and in what we do, our core business, but also how we can educate our vendors, our supply chain so that it is also one that is certified in environmental terms so that we can add that to our own scope 3 statements.
That is very important. This was covered by all areas. Now we're going to go into safety and security. As I mentioned, this is a non-negotiable for us. I would like Pecchio to go first. What do you think a safe company for all means?
Safety can be seen in the different lenses. We can actually protect the lives of our workers. That's one thing.
We can also make sure that our environment is safe for our workers, workers that are our internal workers who are trained by us. This is where we usually have the best indicators in our field. We do great work in that sense in our company, but we also have to look at our construction work. This is where we see different risks, and we have to look at that. We are currently revisiting our entire production construction process from hiring incentives that we offer to the third players who we work with to see whether we would be punishing them in case their workers are not safe so that we can get to zero accidents. This is what we're aiming for. We have to work towards that. These are two entirely different worlds, right?
In one way, we have our energy operations, which is what we have most control over because we have many years of experience and most of our workers have long tenures. You can help them to really build that safety culture. Whereas when we look at our construction sites, there is great churn of employees. We are operating in different regions, and these third-party companies hire people who are not all equally trained. That makes it more difficult for us to achieve the same level of culture as we have in our own operations. We are working to improve that, and we are sure that we're going to be able to improve our results by revisiting our process when we hire third parties and while also overseeing construction till delivery.
I know that we do not have much time, so I will move to the next topic.
As we go through the roundtables, if anyone wants to know more details about safety, both on our operations and construction sites, please let me know. I will be happy to answer and my team as well. Okay, moving to the next topic, which is one that is very important for investors, analysts, and was also listed in our cloud work, is the regulatory agenda. These are some of the topics that have been discussed by regulatory agencies and that might pose challenges in our business. Our growth depends on these regulatory changes, right?
This is a topic that is very important, and we have talked a lot to our investors about it. We are now currently developing some activities and interactions either through our sector associations or companies with whom we partner in those regards. You can rest assured that this is actually part of our daily routine.
We will be talking more about that shortly, but I wanted to actually highlight two things from what we see in this slide. First is what we have, the concessions that are due to expire, and the idea is to show some of the advantages in maintaining these concessions, given our current standpoint. Of course, taking into consideration the complexity of a company such as TAESA, where we have had some opportunities to show how that works in real life. This is something that is particularly important to us. Not only that, we also want to be able to show the economic gains that we get from that. Whenever we want to renew a concession, we need to show the numbers, right? In both companies, even if you are renewing concessions or having new bidding processes, we have to look at those things, especially due to the tariff review.
Climate is also a big thing now. We have now floods, heavy winds, rainfall, and we need legislation to also keep up with the climate change because we know that environmental conditions are now deteriorating. We have to make sure that the regulatory agencies look into that. We have to sit down at the table with those regulatory agencies as well to discuss those topics. During the roundtables, we can deep dive into those things. Now I'd like to hear more about our concessions to see what is the schedule that we have in that regard.
Thank you, Pecchio.
Good morning. I want to thank all of you for joining us and thank the leadership for inviting me to talk today. Renovation of concessions. Renewing concessions is indeed something that has become sort of a hot topic here at TAESA.
Our board has asked us to look into that in all auctions and all updates so that we are always in par with what's going on. Starting in 2022, when the 11314 decree was issued, TAESA started working in meetings with ANEEL, ONS, the Ministry of Energy to show them that renewing concessions is as important as creating new bids. We know that this decree shows that there is a priority for renewing concessions and current concessions. We want to show that it is important for us to keep these assets, to keep these concessions. That's why at TAESA we have an internal group to analyze and conduct constant research. We have developed technical methodologies to assess price and make sure that we can find the best alternatives for our company so we are ready for any future alternatives.
In 2024, last year, ANEEL accompanied us to open for two subsidy grants. The regulatory agency opened up for the [Foreign language] Decreto 11314. Social participation to see whether we should see changes in the decree that I mentioned earlier. We had a technical round of discussion, but also one focused on the financial impacts of those changes. The idea was to also discuss indemnities for assets still in their current life cycle. The agency is discussing with ABRACE and ABID, which are big associations in our industry, and also law firms to discuss how these things can impact TAESA and what's the best interest of our company. We've been discussing with ANEEL and with the Ministry of Energy to see how we can show our arguments to the government so that we can have access to renew concessions as well.
We've been discussing with the regulatory agency and the Ministry, and in 2026, we will try to bring to the agenda of the new government to be elected next year the topic of concessions. This can be discussed while they draft their proposals for the business society. We believe that there's a lot of work to be done in the next few years, even though we have some concessions that are going to expire recently. We know that there can be political impacts, but we are mapping those so we know what all the risks related to either new bids or renewed concessions. What you should know is that TAESA is working hard to assess all possibilities, and regardless of the final decision, we will be ready both for postponing our current concessions or renewing our concessions. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you about the regulatory agenda.
I will be part of the roundtables if you have any additional questions.
Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Catia. You will be able to talk more about that. One more topic: people and culture, right? You mentioned that earlier. You said that culture is an important topic for us here at TAESA, and it's a strategic component of our company. Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, sure. We've been discussing different ways in which we can address our problems in terms of resource allocation and any compliance problems through innovation. That requires a working environment, a culture that is open to transformation so that we can introduce new ways of working. Our company has a very diverse team, which is important to us, not only because this is a fad, but because we actually see big benefits from bringing people together, coming from different backgrounds, from different regions.
We value our female leadership, and I believe that we are well positioned to make sure that our people feel well working with us and have their voices heard, regardless of the topic. Before we go into that, we have Cynthia here with us, and she is our Head of People here at the company. She will be talking more about what we have done in our team to really foster a culture that fits what we are trying to achieve as a company.
Thank you, Catia. Good morning, everyone. To deliver innovation and increase efficiency, you need to take care of people. Talking about that, we are talking about potentializing our culture, which means bringing our employees on board just to ensure our values are put into place, if they make sense with our new journey as a company, our restructuring, our search for innovation and efficiency.
We search for a collaborative approach. We have over 400 employees on the field, and we gear efforts into training them. This year, we've tried to disseminate and roll out expertise to our technical teams. We've been investing in our trainings of our technical teams in addition to our leadership pipeline. We have the manager avatar as a way for the leadership to identify the set of competencies and skills required for different positions and also to map out the complementary skills that are required. We are striving for a really transparent communication so that we can put into place an innovative culture. We already have some programs in place of a technical internship. We have our succession program where we map out potential successors for our leadership and for coming up with a leadership pipeline. That goes in line with our leaders mentioned.
Since 2021, we have a diversity and inclusion program in place where we've implemented initiatives to allow for quotas and just to ensure we have a diverse team and we increase the number of female leaders we have in our company, in addition to increasing the number of self-declared Black employees. We also have the movement Rasa as a priority, so race is a priority movement, and we support them in addition to different programs that we support. We've done that organically throughout our company. Our culture also really values the work environment. We are certified and we've been awarded over the last years as a really diverse and good company to work for. I think that our culture really is the foundation of what we do. We are a Great Place to Work certified company.
We've been awarded different years, and we are on a daily basis trying to see what we can do to increasingly the quality of life of our employees.
Cynthia just mentioned some of the prizes that are in the awards that are in the market. We are in the Innovation Award, GHG Protocol, so greenhouse gases, efficiency in the energy industry. These are just some of the examples we have of this great job that we have done in that front. Continuing, I'm going to turn over to Pecchio to address some of the goals we had in terms of a low-carbon economy.
Yeah, we have reports, we have programs, we have the climate change impact that we are going to measure in the SS2 report.
We will try to release that ahead of time, but I think what's key here is that when we talk about electricity transmission, there are going to be losses that will have an impact and a certain carbon footprint. There is a technical characteristic of the industry that is just inherent. When we're talking about gas emissions, we need really to offset that. We've worked to do that. There is a program so that we can achieve these goals that we set for ourselves. In the future, we want to eliminate any and all carbon footprint. Today, considering the nature of our business, it's quite complicated. That's just what I had to add to that.
Great, excellent. Now we're going to focus on financial efficiency. I think financial management and efficiency is key for our business.
I'm going to turn over to Catia to address that so that we can come to an end here.
I think that you gave so great, many examples of efficiency. For me to address financial efficiency is quite easy now. We're talking about innovation, we're talking about efficiency, and our role here is to make sure that our money is being well used. We need to interact with different teams. We focus on planning and using a collaborative approach to try to map out all company initiatives. We are constantly monitoring what is being done versus what we expected to be done in terms of OpEx, their reviews regarding their returns expected of the projects. Like I said, the supply chain is key in terms of working capital, increasing scale. We have our tax planning. We have 44 concessions.
How can we outline a strategic tax plan for these concessions for those that are already in place and for possible new auctions? How can we think differently and just become more competitive? Our treasury team, we've been working together with Cristiano . How can we add value to this department? Smartly allocating resources, predictability. We need a better center of operation. We also need to focus on liability management that is really focusing on the issuances we've had. We are a AAA company, which is great. It's something that is the result of all the work we put in. We are definitely always looking into new market opportunities. If we see that it makes sense, we will take action. Basically, what we do is we monitor and monetize the company's EBITDA so that we can generate cash. We convert basically everything into cash.
We want to have access to that and to the capital and money markets, but also consider different options so that we can count with a diversified financing portfolio, either considering new projects to re-leverage some of the projects. We need part of this portfolio in hand, but also look into new investments from a critical standpoint. We need to analyze the profitability we expect from each project so that we ensure that we keep growing. We need to be disciplined to ensure that we are distributing earnings for our shareholders. Adding value to our shareholders is also key. We've been distributing dividends. We invested BRL 11 billion, and then we distributed BRL 14 billion. When we talk about cash generation, we need to focus on our cost control, costs, but also to ensure access to new investments so that we can constantly generate cash.
I think this is key for us to face any and all challenging situations that are really natural to our business.
Thank you so much for that. I think that you're quite eager to ask your questions to our leaders here. First of all, thank you so much for your participation here. Before we have a break, I would like just to give you some reminders. Just again, we will have the QR code here for you to answer the survey. It's quite fast. Those of you who are online, we want to hear from you how your experience was in this first session. I am sure that you may have written down some of these questions you want to ask. Then we will have the dynamic roundtable so that you can have your answers answered. We will have about a 10- 15 minute break.
Those of you who are online, just pay attention to the event because we will be back soon.
[Foreign language] TAESA, compromisso e pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação. Energia é movimento, evolução é a força que dá vida a tudo o que conhecemos. Sem ela, o mundo não existiria. Com ela, ele se expande e renova. A TAESA conecta o Brasil a essa transformação, transmitindo a energia que gera desenvolvimento para todas as regiões do país. De olho no futuro, mas sem esquecer do presente, ela investe em projetos de pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação que garantem a segurança e qualidade de suas operações e provocam as mudanças que farão a diferença amanhã. Entre eles, podemos destacar o monitoramento inteligente de torres estaiadas. Esta é uma plataforma que utiliza fusão de sensores em IoT para a coleta de dados que servirão como base para a tomada de decisões, trazendo mais confiabilidade a estes ativos.
[Foreign language] Inspeção semiautônoma com drone em torres de linha de transmissão, cujo objetivo é desenvolver sistema de voo automatizado com o qual o drone poderá identificar componentes da estrutura e fazer registros fotográficos para as inspeções periódicas, trazendo como benefício a redução de exposição de pessoas aos riscos críticos que a atividade envolve de altura e eletricidade. Análise preditiva de falhas por inteligência artificial, sistema que poderá ser adotado em subestações elétricas para identificar possíveis falhas, emitir alertas via aplicativo, além de visualizar e analisar os dados em software. Também realizamos projetos em parceria com o Instituto Abrat de Energia. Agora vamos apresentar o projeto Análise Automática de Segurança, que visa automatizar e identificar o uso de equipamentos de proteção individual, assim como o comportamento seguro dos colaboradores da TAESA e terceiros em canteiro de obra e subestação.
[Foreign language] O conjunto de sistemas é alimentado por imagens de câmeras de segurança, que são enviadas para software que as analisa e detecta situações de risco. Com isso, ele é capaz de emitir alertas e gerar relatórios em uma infraestrutura baseada em blockchain.
[Foreign language] O projeto 55 de PDI, a análise automática de segurança, tem como objetivo principal a melhoria no acompanhamento das atividades que são realizadas em campo. Ele tem como objetivo nos ajudar na identificação do uso correto dos equipamentos de proteção individuais, assim como nos comportamentos seguros durante a execução dessas atividades. Tivemos uma preocupação que o projeto fosse agnóstico, então não ficamos presos e limitados a nenhum tipo específico de equipamento, o que nos dá uma liberdade maior, tanto para a atuação quanto também para escalonar o projeto. É uma soma de fato, isso agrega e é uma forma também de trabalhar e cada vez mais trazer inovação para a área de segurança de trabalho.
[Foreign language] A TAESA inova para tornar o setor elétrico brasileiro cada vez mais seguro, cuidando genuinamente das pessoas e transmitindo a energia que transforma vidas. TAESA, compromisso e pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação. Energia é movimento, evolução é a força que dá vida a tudo o que conhecemos. Sem ela, o mundo não existiria. Com ela, ele se expande e renova. A TAESA conecta o Brasil a essa transformação, transmitindo a energia que gera desenvolvimento para todas as regiões do país. De olho no futuro, mas sem esquecer do presente, ela investe em projetos de pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação que garantem a segurança e qualidade de suas operações e provocam as mudanças que farão a diferença amanhã. Entre eles, podemos destacar o monitoramento inteligente de torres estaiadas.
[Foreign language] Esta é uma plataforma que utiliza fusão de sensores em IoT para a coleta de dados que servirão como base para a tomada de decisões, trazendo mais confiabilidade a estes ativos. Inspeção semiautônoma com drone em torres de linha de transmissão, cujo objetivo é desenvolver sistema de voo automatizado com o qual o drone poderá identificar componentes da estrutura e fazer registros fotográficos para as inspeções periódicas, trazendo como benefício a redução de exposição de pessoas aos riscos críticos que a atividade envolve de altura e eletricidade. Análise preditiva de falhas por inteligência artificial, sistema que poderá ser adotado em subestações elétricas para identificar possíveis falhas, emitir alertas via aplicativo, além de visualizar e analisar os dados em software. Também realizamos projetos em parceria com o Instituto Abrat de Energia.
[Foreign language] Agora vamos apresentar o projeto Análise Automática de Segurança, que visa automatizar e identificar o uso de equipamentos de proteção individual, assim como o comportamento seguro dos colaboradores da TAESA e terceiros em canteiro de obra e sub.
[Foreign language] Conjunto de sistemas é alimentado por imagens de câmeras de segurança, que são enviadas para software que as analisa e detecta situações de risco. Com isso, ele é capaz de emitir alertas e gerar relatórios em uma infraestrutura baseada em blockchain.
[Foreign language] O projeto 55 de PDI, a análise automática de segurança, tem como objetivo principal a melhoria no acompanhamento das atividades que são realizadas em campo. Ele tem como objetivo nos ajudar na identificação do uso correto dos equipamentos de proteção individuais, assim como nos comportamentos seguros durante a execução dessas atividades. Tivemos uma preocupação que o projeto fosse agnóstico, então não ficamos presos e limitados a nenhum tipo específico de equipamento, o que nos dá uma liberdade maior tanto para a atuação quanto também para escalonar o projeto. É uma soma, de fato, isso agrega e é uma forma também de trabalhar e cada vez mais trazer inovação para a área de segurança do trabalho.
[Foreign language] TAESA innovates to make the Brazilian electricity sector increasingly safer, genuinely caring for people and transmitting the energy that transforms lives. TAESA, commitment and research, development and innovation. Energy is movement, evolution. It is the force that gives life to everything we know. Without it, the world would not exist. With it, it expands and renews. TAESA connects Brazil to this transformation, transmitting the energy that generates development for all regions of the country. Looking to the future, but without forgetting the present, it invests in research, development and innovation projects that ensure the safety and quality of its operations and drive the changes that will make a difference tomorrow. Among them, we can highlight the intelligent monitoring of guyed towers. This is a platform that uses sensor fusion in IoT for data collection, which will serve as a basis for decision-making, bringing more reliability to these assets.
[Foreign language] Semi-autonomous inspection with drones on transmission line towers aims to develop an automated flight system, with which the drone can identify structural components and take photographic records for periodic inspections, bringing as a benefit the reduction of people's exposure to critical risks that the activity involves, such as height and electricity. Predictive failure analysis by artificial intelligence is a system that can be adopted in electrical substations to identify possible failures, issue alerts via application, and also visualize and analyze the data in software. We also carry out projects in partnership with the Instituto Abrat de Energia. Now we will present the Automatic Safety Analysis project, which aims to automate and identify the use of personal protective equipment, as well as the safe behavior of TAESA employees and third parties in construction sites and substations.
[Foreign language] The set of systems is fed by images from security cameras, which are sent to software that analyzes them and detects risk situations. With this, it is able to issue alerts and generate reports in a blockchain-based infrastructure. Project 55 of R&D, the automatic safety analysis, has as its main objective the improvement in monitoring the activities that are carried out in the field. Its objective is to help us identify the correct use of personal protective equipment, as well as safe behaviors during the execution of these activities. A gente teve uma preocupação que o projeto fosse agnóstico, então a gente não fica preso e limitado a nenhum tipo específico de equipamento, que nos dá uma liberdade maior tanto para a atuação quanto também para escalonar o projeto.
[Foreign language] É uma soma, de fato, isso agrega e é uma forma também de trabalhar e cada vez mais trazer inovação para a área de segurança do trabalho. A TAESA inova para tornar o setor elétrico brasileiro cada vez mais seguro, cuidando genuinamente das pessoas e transmitindo a energia que transforma vidas. TAESA, compromisso e pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação. Energia é movimento, evolução. É a força que dá vida a tudo o que conhecemos. Sem ela, o mundo não existiria. Com ela, ele se expande e renova. A TAESA conecta o Brasil a essa transformação, transmitindo a energia que gera desenvolvimento para todas as regiões do país. De olho no futuro, mas sem esquecer do presente, ela investe em projetos de pesquisa, desenvolvimento e inovação que garantem a segurança e qualidade de suas operações e provocam as mudanças que farão a diferença amanhã.
[Foreign language] Entre eles, podemos destacar o monitoramento inteligente de torres estaiadas. Esta é uma plataforma que utiliza fusão de sensores em IoT para a coleta de dados, que servirão como base para a tomada de decisões, trazendo mais confiabilidade a estes ativos. Inspeção semiautônoma com drone em torres de linha de transmissão, cujo objetivo é desenvolver sistema de voo automatizado, com o qual o drone poderá identificar componentes da estrutura e fazer registros fotográficos para as inspeções periódicas, trazendo como benefício a redução de exposição de pessoas aos riscos críticos que a atividade envolve de altura e eletricidade. Análise preditiva de falhas por inteligência artificial, sistema que poderá ser adotado em subestações elétricas para identificar possíveis falhas, emitir alertas via aplicativo, além de visualizar e analisar os dados em software. Também realizamos projetos em parceria com o Instituto Abrat de Energia.
[Foreign language] Agora vamos apresentar o projeto Análise Automática de Segurança, que visa automatizar e identificar o uso de equipamentos de proteção individual, assim como o comportamento seguro dos colaboradores da TAESA e terceiros em canteiro de obra e subestação. O conjunto de sistemas é alimentado por imagens de câmeras de segurança, que são enviadas para software que as analisa e detecta situações de risco. Com isso, ele é capaz de emitir alertas e gerar relatórios em uma infraestrutura baseada em blockchain.
[Foreign language] O projeto 55 de PDI, a análise automática de segurança, tem como objetivo principal a melhoria no acompanhamento das atividades que são realizadas em campo. Ele tem como objetivo nos ajudar na identificação do uso correto dos equipamentos de proteção individuais, assim como nos comportamentos seguros durante a execução dessas atividades. A gente teve uma preocupação que o projeto fosse agnóstico, então a gente não fica preso e limitado a nenhum tipo específico de equipamento, que nos dá uma liberdade maior tanto para a atuação quanto também para escalonar o projeto. É uma soma, de fato, isso agrega e é uma forma também de trabalhar e cada vez mais trazer inovação para a área de segurança do trabalho.
[Foreign language] TAESA innovates to make the Brazilian electricity sector increasingly safer, genuinely caring for people and transmitting the energy that transforms lives. TAESA, commitment and research, development and innovation. Energy is movement...
[Foreign language] Bem, estamos de volta. Estamos de volta com o Enrique e com o Rodrigo.
I hope you all had a chance to have some coffee, get to know each other. I hope that those of you online...
[Foreign language] Agora a gente vai para o restante da dinâmica da conversa.
Get a little bit of a rest. Now we are going into our roundtables. As we mentioned, we have five different roundtables, and we ask our leaders to sit at their first table. We have numbers on them, and I hope that our support team can help our leaders find their seats. While we organize everything, let me tell you how things will be working. We're going to have 10-minute conversations. You will see a timer on the screen, so make the most out of the time. Asking specific questions for each leader.
Leader, talk about topics that that leader is an expert on. For those of you remotely, you can also ask your questions over WhatsApp. We have our team which will be collecting your questions, so we can ask them to our leaders, and we will have one of our roundtables being streamed live. I want to remind you of our satisfaction survey. Behind your name tag, you will see, behind your badge, you will see the QR code for the satisfaction survey and also a QR code for where to send your questions. Please scan these QR codes. Those of you at home, you also have the two QR codes, and you can scan it to tell us more about your opinions and your experience on our two panels.
When we are one minute behind the timer, you'll listen to a notification alarm, so you will know that leaders will be moving tables and to make sure that our leaders can wrap up their last answers. Then again, leaders will move tables. Investors and participants shouldn't move tables. Leaders are the only ones who will be moving. This is a good opportunity for you to build closer connections. With that, let's start with our dynamic round.
[Foreign language] O pessoal do online, mas o pessoal do online vai conseguir ouvir todas as mesas? Só nós.
[Foreign language] Tá. Seus Diretores, todos vão passar aqui.
[Foreign language] Tá, legal. Espera aí que eu estou cobrindo o setor há mais de 20 anos, né?
I have been working in this industry for over 20 years. Throughout these two decades, I have never seen as many great experts in this field letting us know that there is a problem in the Brazilian energy grid. This is a problem we see every single day now. For example, we see excess solar power, and we do not see short-term solutions for this problem. My question is, if we look at the company's strategy, how can a transmission energy company add value to shareholders given where we are today?
There are some avenues ahead. One is a regulatory avenue because even though we usually say we know what to expect from the future, there is some level of speculation, right? There are many different opportunities in that sense.
In any scenario we face, we believe that the opportunities that we will have ahead in terms of investments, either through new lines or batteries that will be able to store energy, will become more urgent and we will have to make quick decisions. When you look at the equipment that we talked about in terms of the auction that is upcoming, we see new compensators that we need to implement to be able to stabilize our system. You could say, yeah, this can be a benefit for transmission companies. That might be so. I think that we do not have a definite solution or long-term solution designed yet. If we can start by installing batteries so that you can really improve performance in the short term, that might prove to be an interesting solution.
Of course, we as a transmission company, or at least we at TAESA, do not go into the subsidies that are sent and granted to other sources because we know that this is a big problem these days. We have other leaders coming here later, but we know that there are many topics that we have to bring to the agenda of presidential candidates next year because we believe that it will take many years for us to address that problem. This will not be something that can be fully addressed by the current term. I do not think that the next one will have enough time to do it in four years. I am optimistic in terms of the technical solutions that we will have to create. I believe that our industry and TAESA need to be ready to act on those issues.
If you look at structural things such as subsidies, and how we can redesign things so that we have little default, I think that can be a more complex issue. We have been talking a lot about that through ABRATI or other class associations that we are members of to see.
[Foreign language] Só que eu não consigo falar.
Tax ramps for these problems. I can see that we can address those issues through investments if we take into consideration that the incentives won't be drastically changed. It has become harder for us to keep postponing revisiting the incentives. I don't know if you have anything to add in that sense. Just to add to what Becky mentioned, it is interesting to see that analysis. If you look 20 years back and how the industry has changed, I see that we are now concerned about excess energy and not the short of energy. We see now transmission companies playing a key role in restructuring the energy grid.
I'd say that there are investments that can be added to transmission, and we have kept track of that because we know that the industry, the energy industry, needs more transmission lines so that we can bring this excess energy to the grid. This is an opportunity for companies like ours because we play a key role in how robust the industry is. We see some assets that are now 30 years old already, and of course, they require reinforcements to be able to take that additional load. This poses a great opportunity to the sector.
Thank you for the opportunity. I have a question about CapEx in terms of reinforcements and improvements of grids because that is a big opportunity for investments given that you do not compete with any other company, as is the case in auctions.
In auctions, we have seen many newcomers trying to push RAPs down. I don't know if they have survived in the industry. Now that there's a backlog, we have seen the prices. They tend to be sort of outdated, especially in transmission operations. I'd like to know how do you see that?
Part of the returns we have on these investments come from the efficiency that companies are able to achieve. I don't know if the industry has changed drastically and if you have to recalibrate those prices because it might be outdated in a way that impacts some equipment negatively. The second question that I have for you is about the regulatory changes on how we calculate the ROI, the WACC.
I see that there is a trend that won't maintain the current WACC, but actually we will see a drop in that because during the pandemic, we had a better impact. We know that usually it hits a bottom before it starts to recover. I don't know how you see that and how the industry could address those issues.
Thank you for your question. Yes, we have seen that ANEEL has really investigated price banks. We know that price banks are one of the topics that we've been discussing with regulatory agencies. We're trying to talk about those things with ANEEL directly. We have observed as well that associations like ABRATI have developed an R&D project to try and find answers to the issues that you have just mentioned, outdated prices and the poor services, to see where our industry currently stands.
We see that the price bank has been a thing for the past 20 years, and it was first restructured with the information coming from state-owned companies. Now, with more modern equipment, new providers, and changes in the market, it is important for us to update the price bank in the system. We have also seen that when you compare the WACC for auctions and reinforcements, ANEEL has tried to set tariffs to reduce WACCs to try and find some more equitable WACCs for auctions and reinforcements because we know that competition now is more efficient in auctions. ANEEL actually plays a role in controlling costs. It plays the role of a competitor trying to find the best alternative so that we can achieve the best prices and therefore be able to make the construction of those assets.
There is another thing in terms of the WACC that we have to talk about, right? There have been big discussions on incentivized ventures and bonds and ending the subsidies that we currently see in tariffs. When I look at those things, I try to change how I see the returns required in a given project, meaning I use incentivized bonds to raise capital. It helps me to raise capital for longer and to reduce my capital cost. This alarm is just to let you know that I'll be moving tables in one minute. I'm very concerned about that because we have to know what it means in real terms, right? This is something I have to take into consideration in terms of the depreciation, right? I have to raise more capital and be less optimistic.
There is another thing that we have to take into consideration, and it also impacts WACC at the end of the day when you look at long-term averages. One thing that was not clear to me is when we look at the stress that the market is under, we see that there's a lot of CapEx being aimed at reinforcements. Yes, WACC is one important thing, and we see this discount in the price banks. Should we still be investing in reinforcement CapEx? Yes, because if you think of the average discount that we currently see is 40%, which is that we are not subject to any cost that you have. We won't have the same gap being eroded by an increase in costs. What we have recently seen is that these CAPEX still make sense.
Maybe sometime from now with the gap becoming wider, that might not be the case anymore. It is also mandatory. In any case, thank you very much. We're moving tables now.
[Foreign language] Agora teremos o João Lima, o Chief of Implementation.
[Foreign language] Ok. À disposição aí para a gente poder conversar um pouco mais perto.
[Foreign language] Bom dia, aqui é a Juliana do Rio.
Good morning, I'm Juliana representing our IAR team. I'm representing everyone who's attending remotely. We have a shareholder, [Willene], from Curitiba. He asked which countries are TAESA's greatest partners in terms of steel, technology, and for implementation projects.
We work with different companies that are multinational companies and present in Brazil. If we answer that way, we work with Swedish, German, U.S. companies, Indian companies, Chinese companies. Different international players are global players and operate in Brazil. What we've seen recently in terms of equipment like transformers and reactors, we've seen a high volume of this equipment provided. We have plants in Brazil that are offering this product also to the international market, exporting these pieces of equipment, especially for HVDC projects and meeting the demand of these countries in terms of renewable energy. In the Brazilian market, we started obviously using and looking for other contractors or providers.
Chinese players then were considered as vendors or even South Korean players. In addition, if we talk about the transmission market, there is an entry barrier for the import of steel structure. The Brazilian industry is protected. We had an Inmetro ruling or ordinance that defined the chemical composition, and there must be an approval by Inmetro for an Indian player to export to Brazil. That's really hard to get. We see today Indian or Chinese companies that are getting these approvals. Now we are coming to a point where we will see these components more frequently available in the Brazilian market. There is a question regarding the synchronous condenser, and we've heard that in the roundtable. The question is, what's your take of the impact of this piece of equipment in terms of reliability? It could maybe get to zero.
What is the conversation you have with the regulatory agency in terms of offsetting the impact of equipment? Lorena, okay. Lorena, great question. When we talk about the synchronous condenser, this is one of the solutions we have to control frequency and voltage. These are two characteristics that are really important to stabilize the network. We've seen even a blackout in Europe that was caused by the quality of the energy transmitted. With regard to the current, I don't see a direct relationship, but there is a direct connection. It allows new photovoltaic plant, but when we talk about solar power or it does help. When we see all the inertia that is possible, it helps to keep the frequency. Let's say voltage control is a different story, but we can do that through this synchronous condenser.
The LATU in this auction in the end of October will list a piece of equipment that is static compensation. We have SPC, that is a different technology whose purpose is quite similar, that is controlling reactive energy in terms of stability of voltage or frequency. I see that in the future, this is a trend, no doubt. Since we're investing less in rotating machines, from a global standpoint, we will see more synchronous condensers or compensators in that case. Since we have this, and when we talk about this synchronous condenser, this is quite normal regarding the profile of generation we have.
Hello, this is Daniel Trovides from [SofraBank]. When we talk about possible solutions for curtailment, you talked about batteries as an opportunity. How do you see this new technology, this new battery to address this topic?
How do you see TAESA entering or tapping into this new market as a growth avenue?
Thank you for your question. In my view, I think that implementing batteries is key. This is for Brazil and this is for TAESA. We must explore this technology. Of course, this is just one of the alternatives. This is a way to store energy, but we can also have reversible plants. TAESA is ready to really tap into this opportunity. Battery is a good solution for curtailment. You're going to generate and store energy. I think that battery represents consumption, but it's going to be stored. In my point of view, we will need to be able to store energy within our system. The point, though, is how are we going to regulate that? We will have this battery storing energy.
The compensation system is going to be quite similar to the transmission system. It is similar to what we do, but it is also a generation asset. We are still looking into the criteria of who will be able to apply. I personally advocate for battery storage could be a large-scale reinforcement. Systemically speaking, its compensation is similar to the transmission system. We have what it takes to implement that within our operating assets. I think personally that we could explore that. What is your take on the timing? I think there was an auction last week about isolated systems, a combination of different energy generating systems, solar power, if I'm not mistaken. What's your take on this cost versus the opportunity? If we have examples in the world where we ended up with more competitive prices, could it happen in Brazil?
Could we see a drop in prices due to the manufacturer of batteries? Oh, Francisco, to be honest, I have no information on pricing database abroad. I do know that the greater the use, the smaller the price will be. What I've seen is an increase in the lifecycle of batteries, and that could be a challenge also. Why? What we say is that for LR CapEx or RL CapEx, we would have an agreement, a 10-year agreement, but the lifecycle of the batteries is 20 years. You have these 10 additional years. Who would manage the situation? This will be considered in the economic model for those who will participate in these auctions. In terms of pricing, we are really going to be following what the market offers. 20 years? Yes.
While we're at it, we've seen an investment boom due to data centers, especially in Europe and the U.S. What is your take? Do you see a lack of equipment here? Juliano, like I've mentioned, no, I don't think we are missing any equipment or we don't have a shortage of equipment. We see different characteristics of the U.S. and European markets. We have Hitachi launching a plant in Pindamonhangaba. [Bag in] Betim is doubling the capacity of this plant, and we start importing from China.
Good morning, everyone. Just to introduce myself, I'm Luis. I'm in charge of TAESA's Operation and Maintenance team. My team totals about 600 people across 18 states of Brazil, six regions of maintenance. TAESA operates using its own teams. We have our maintenance teams, all our electricians are our own employees. We have in our headquarters our Operations Center, in addition to our Engineering Asset Management teams. We have Paula here that is always looking into our variable portion. We have this entire corporate structure to keep our availability index as high as possible.
I'm Daniel from Banco Safra. You talked in your presentation about the use of technology, the drones, automation, different technology. From a cost perspective, versus what you didn't have in the past, how in terms of drops in costs, you could give us your take on the next transmission auction?
You expect from companies the return maybe not being worth it considering the investment in technology that is being made. Based on what we have in place and considering our historical data, we've been absorbing inflation and keeping our efficiency rates. Even in our projects under implementation or in operation, we've been investing in technology. When we talk about equipment, maintenance, and also... It's about really to properly allocating resources. When we talk about the auction... I think you have really to improve your performance. In the past, when we had zero under pricing, today we have... We still have 40% under pricing when we talk about it. The use of technology is going to help if we have more aggressive under pricing, but also keeping the profitability rates of the project. Once you can reduce costs, it can happen. We saw in the picture the inspection of a tower.
In the past, we needed three people to go up this tower. Today, I have two people. One person using the drone for this inspection to quickly happen. In addition, it's much safer. Safety is key for us. It makes inspections safer. Like we saw here in the video of SAÍRA, the drone gets so close to the piece of equipment that is fully energized. We have a much higher precision of possible failures in the equipment, in the piece of equipment. It... of possible shutdowns or just helps to prevent that from happening and from really preventing the risk of increasing the variable portion. Since like I said, the risk of paying variable portion is really high. If we talk about five-hour downtime, we're talking about BRL 12 million in terms of variable portion.
We have our logistics, we have our team that is ready to act and take action for us to restore operations as fast as possible. In addition to also our monitoring, and we really consider the condition of each piece of equipment.
[Foreign language] Como ele performa, como ele vem performando, se ele tem alguma tendência, a gente consegue se antecipar a isso. Então, se eu consigo programar uma intervenção, mesmo que está no período de franquia do equipamento, eu pago cada 10. If I already do this in a scheduled way, it's 10 times the shutdown cost, I can do it faster, I have all the planning, I avoid paying 150 times our variable portion cost.
[Foreign language] Eu, talvez, tenha uma pergunta não muito boa, mas você desculpa a ignorância ali, porque essa forma de operação que a ONS tem agora de rampar violentamente no final do dia exige muito mais os equipamentos de transmissão? Ela traz algum risco maior do que era antigamente, que não tinha essa rampada tão rápida da térmica e da hidroelétrica para compensar a queda da geração solar?
[Foreign language] O que nós temos visto é bem na linha do que você falou, e nós temos identificado maior volume de operação dos equipamentos. Antes, nós temos reatores, por exemplo, que são equipamentos para controle de tensão e nas subestações, eles manobravam pouco. Hoje, nós identificamos que o volume de manobras é bem superior ao passado, e é justamente para você manter aí o nível de segurança operativa. Né? E do ponto técnico de risco, isso tudo é mapeado dentro da operação do ONS e aí fica muito na linha do que a Paula falou, na questão da saúde do equipamento. Nós monitoramos isso online, volume de operações e entre outras grandezas que também nos geram uma possibilidade de reforço de uma melhoria.
[Foreign language] Quando a gente identifica que você está tendendo a atingir uma superação de equipamento, seja pelo volume de manobra, seja pela capacidade de transmissão, aí surge um pouco do que nós falamos ali dos reforços, de você indicar esse equipamento para a sua substituição. De forma bem sucinta na resposta sua, isso é controlado, você tem acompanhamento maior da confiabilidade dele, mas o equipamento suporta esse tipo de manobra, esse tipo de intervenção, tá?
[Foreign language] online investor, the people who are watching remotely. I wanted to ask a question about reinforcements and improvements. You mentioned that you reorganized the area of reinforcements and improvements, so I wanted to understand, maybe even for the remote audience, the difference between large-scale and small-scale and the relevance of small-scale as well.
[Foreign language] Perfeito. E se eu puder complementar, são vocês que identificam a oportunidade de reforço e melhoria, aí vocês propõem para o sinal dar pau e aí vocês são penalizados. Uma vez que você propõe, ele vira mandatório? Se você pudesse esclarecer essa parte, obrigado. Então.
[Foreign language] Primeiro vou responder a pergunta dele aqui nessa questão do reforço. Então, reforços de pequeno porte, normalmente a própria empresa que determina, né? O que que ele é baseado? Existem algumas regras, primeiro, né? A necessidade de você entender o procedimento de rede. Por exemplo, surge novo procedimento de rede que você tem que ter equipamento específico para atender uma característica, né? Então, é a responsabilidade de cada agente identificar isso, estar acompanhando essa mudança do procedimento de rede e implementá-lo. Para isso você tem uma receita, né? No outro lado também é sua responsabilidade monitorar o equipamento no sentido de confiabilidade, né? Você detecta que o equipamento não está mais confiável e você pode fazer uma solicitação, né? Até o dia 31 de julho de cada ano, você cadastra as oportunidades que você identifica de reforço e melhoria de pequeno porte.
[Foreign language] De três a quatro meses, o ONS analisa a pertinência disso, nem tudo que você cadastra, né? Ele vira reforço, ele tem que seguir as regras, né? Do procedimento de rede, eles estando corretos, de acordo com o procedimento de rede, eles são autorizados no final do ano e aí você tem de dois a três anos para implementar esse reforço, a troca desse equipamento.
[Foreign language] Esse reforço é compulsório, só que a princípio você pode acontecer o cenário onde o reforço é compulsório e você não concordar com o financeiro que você vai receber?
[Foreign language] Tem duas situações, né? Tem reforços que são VOC, que chama valor contábil, que ele é referente ao custo que você implantou. Quando é equipamento muito específico, que você não tem no banco de preços da ANEEL, e tem casos sim que você segue o banco de preço. Quando você vê a questão do reforço, existem situações sim que você tem algum reforço que ele é mais caro do que o banco de preço, mas na média sempre eles se compensam ali. Se ficar mais caro, você justifica junto à ANEEL e abre processo ali tentando reaver esse custo, ou seja, por variação cambial, ou seja, por uma atualização do banco de preço. Quando é valor contábil, não, né? O valor que você gastou no investimento, ele é ressarcido dentro da receita, né? Dentro da RAP.
[Foreign language] E aí entra a parte da nossa engenharia também, né? O João Lima mostrou pouco sobre as soluções técnicas, né? De usar o cabo isolado, são soluções que nós entendemos para conseguir fazer caber dentro do preço quando a gente entra nessa discussão junto com a ANEEL.
Obrigado, viu, gente? Obrigado.
[Foreign language] you speak here, the people online can hear, it's good. Let me see.
I'm going to put it on the microphone so people can hear us on Zoom, right?
A transmissão.
I'd like to just say hi to everyone who's with us remotely.
Okay, can I ask the first question?
[Foreign language] Eu estava discutindo com o Navant aqui, só essa questão de.
We were talking about.
[Foreign language] As concessões que estão vencendo.
The concessions that are about to expire, right?
[Foreign language] A preferência de vocês é pela restituição.
You would rather go for a.
Investment opportunity.
Concession, right? Renewed concession.
[Foreign language] No caso, por exemplo, de uma reelicitação.
If we think about these renewed concessions, how do you calculate the indemnization amount that you're expected to get?
[Foreign language] Como é que você vê uma eventual?
How do you see competition for these royalties?
[Foreign language] Quais são os players hoje que podem?
Who are the other players in the market that could maybe compete with you right now?
[Foreign language] Muito bom, eu não sei se pela avaliação.
I don't know if Pecchio and Luis have already been here. They have, right?
[Foreign language] Perfeito, isso. Talvez só pegar gancho aqui do seu ponto. Nós não temos uma preferência para renovar as concessões.
We do not really prefer these renewed concession licenses, actually. We're saying that renewing would be beneficial to the system. I think that we are concerned with unstable operations. Therefore, we have to properly maintain those assets. As Luis mentioned, we have some concessions that are very important for the interconnected system, the SIN. Of course, we have to look into energy security as well. That's the analysis that we advocate for being conducted. That varies between cases. I was just talking to the colleagues on other tables. What we see in Brazil is that most concessions are actually renewed, and they are not put for new bids. Big contracts that were expiring in 2015 were even renewed early in 2013, 2012. Of course, that was part of a very particular context that impacted some economic clauses. They went for reconcession. We see the same thing in electricity transmission, right?
That was for distribution. In any case, in the energy sector, we have seen that in most cases, concessions are renewed. That is an administrative choice that the government has to make. We'll just advocate that they should conduct analysis and not simply choose one over the other. Renewed concessions could actually bring benefits to the society more broadly as well. In your presentation, you talked about auctions, and you showed that we have lots across the company from north to south. We had an investor who is with us online, Angelo Cardoso, who's asking whether TAESA has identified any projects that have synergies with our current projects in the call for tenders. Angelo asked, right? Angelo, thank you so very much for your question. Yes, indeed.
There are many lots being offered in this auction in different geographies in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and in the northernmost Brazil and southernmost Brazil. We know that we are a continental-sized country, but TAESA is part of all our regions, most states. Most assets now being auctioned are in similar areas where we already operate, meaning that we can use them properly, not only because we have a lot of expertise in terms of implementation, licensing, and construction work, but also because we have great expertise in operations, maintenance, and shared assets. The geography is not necessarily synonym to synergy. We can find synergy not because two assets are in the same location, but because they actually share equipment. If different assets use similar equipment, that might be advantageous because we already have spare parts.
We have specialized teams, skilled teams, trained teams, and it's easy for me to integrate the equipment in our central hub. It is easier for us to integrate those assets. Some synergy may come from geography, but others not as much. This is all taken into consideration in our assessment when we build our business plan, which involves field visits and on-site surveys, discussion with vendors, engineering projects. We even look at some projects before we even win the bid, all of that to make sure that we have an optimized business plan. This is something that is built step by step and tends to be ready just a few days before the auction. It is quite demanding and time-consuming, but that's what allows us to select the best options until the auction is really launched.
I'm Lorena from Itaú.
We have identified some opportunities in the sense of selling transmission assets. How does TAESA see M&A opportunities in the next few years, and how does that fit your strategy?
Lorena, right? Thank you for your question. When we first started our opening remarks here, Pecchio and João showed that the first years of TAESA were actually filled with M&As. In the past decade, we actually focused our efforts in greenfield projects. I'd say that now we can operate well on both sides. We have well-established processes to both acquire or incorporate a new company, or also develop new capabilities to build new sites, which is a completely different game, right? It requires different expertise from different departments.
We have worked hard to develop projects by studying what is offered in not only this auction, but what will be offered in future auctions, and what we can do in terms of storage as well. We could be very interesting. We are very focused on those different projects because we are confident in our ability to develop these projects. Of course, sometimes we see M&A opportunities, but we always select these opportunities very carefully because it's one thing to assess what's out there to rule out some options that are not beneficial to us. We only move conversations forward when projects make full sense, and we see an interesting angle or something that would allow us to actually stand out from the competition and give us a competitive edge. I'd say that being selective is key here.
We can, of course, look into those opportunities when they make sense for our companies because there's a big pipeline, an interesting pipeline of projects on the greenfield side of businesses right now.
I'm Daniel from Banco Safra. Now, looking into that idea that you mentioned about selecting projects and the return we expect, we see some players in the industry looking for opportunities outside of Brazil and getting good return on their investments and in US dollars. Have you assessed that opportunity in that sense? Do you have anything in your pipeline? If not, why not? What is the barrier for that right now, given that competition in Brazil for transmission auctions has proven to be very challenging? That's a great question. TAESA has actually been part of some conversations with regards to these possibilities.
We know we are a Brazilian company, and we are focusing our efforts to Brazil. That's, of course, not written in stone. We're not limited to Brazil. There are many options and many opportunities that we could still explore here in Brazil because we are familiar with the legal structure and environmental licensing processes that, even though it changes from time to time and it might be challenging here and there, which is part of the game, we're familiar with the rules. Going into new jurisdictions would require a learning curve. That's why we have chosen to restrict our businesses to Brazil with a risk profile in BRL. Our hedge, which is very efficient in Brazil, allows us to have good operations in the country. That's why right now we are not really focusing on investing in international projects.
Okay, but when we talk about new businesses, you talked about that potential learning curve. That is also true for batteries, right? I might not be aware of that, but it seems that you do not have big relevant projects in terms of battery projects, right? What return do you expect in battery projects when compared to the learning curve that is necessary to really standardize this process internally? I think that energy storage is like a transformer. If you go to a distribution concession, there are distributors there. The same thing is true for transmission and even energy generation. The same thing will be true for storage systems because not only will you see it in distribution, transmission, and generation, but also with the end customers, on the end of the end customers. That's a learning curve for all of us.
On our side, we have to keep up with the new regulations to see whether that is an interesting investment for us because it can become more complex or more risky than we are willing to accept. On the other hand, on the technical side, we have to develop that technical expertise in-house. Very few companies in Brazil have big experience with that right now. Technology is changing so fast that even those who have a battery bank use technology that is older and is not what is going to be used now. This is actually leveling all players due to the fact that this technology is new and we're all learning.
Okay, Catia, let me ask you the first question. I just want to know one thing. We have seen some renewable generators with cash flow issues, facing cash flow issues.
Does that lead to higher default rates for transmission lines? How does that work right now?
That's a great question, actually. When we look at the default rates in our industry, what we started seeing last year was the gold rush, you know, for the new brewing expenses. This was, as I mentioned, just a gold rush that came from the fact that we had generators from renewable sources that did not even connect to the grid. Of course, there were no warranties. Apart from that, we haven't seen much change, at least here at TAESA. Everything has been well provisioned. We, of course, have a big responsibility to try and recover the termination of liabilities, but we know that it's almost impossible for us to get that money back.
In any case, we are working with ANEEL and ONS to really protest and sue these customers who actually came for the gold rush and then take that to the courts. ONS will be responsible for conducting those cases so that we can just complete the process so that we are not penalized with any RAP adjustments. The worst-case scenario would be not being paid and having to pay something out. That's why we are working hard to make sure that doesn't happen. We are working ahead of schedule, given the deadlines that ANEEL gave us. We are working with other transmission companies and associations, but we haven't identified any big risk in that sense now.
Hey, Catia, thank you for the opportunity to be here with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the refinancing processes have been like for the credit lines?
Because we are almost entering 2026 now, and there are some concessions that are due to expire in 2030. Have you been discussing with the financial sector what that was going to look like? Will we be able to refinance these concessions, given the fact that we don't know what the rules will be after 2030?
Actually, we do not work with commercial banks. Our original debts are in the capital market. We usually issue incentivized bonds. When we look at raising capital, we always pay our debts before the concession is over. That's how we model our financial processes. We do that per concession. We try to be more conservative, given the fact that we know that the concession might not be given to us again. Of course, we try to be optimistic and believe that the concessions will be given to us when renewed.
If we look at our debt and capital raising efforts, we tend to be very conservative. We always pay our debt, or at least the debt related to a given concession, before the concession is due so that we do not have any impact in the company results. We know that the policy today follows the current regulation. The earnings distribution policy follows the regulatory ruling. How do you see that now that we are getting closer to the expiration date of some concessions? Will there be any adjustments? No, not. We haven't seen. We are not planning a big change. We made some changes in 2024 with these updated policies for earning distribution. We know that the regulatory requirements changed, and so we changed it as well. We are paying 50% of our corporate income, but we usually talk about between 90% and 100%.
Now we paid 100% both in the first and second quarter. Basically, that's going to 56% of the shareholder value and the corporate income. We're trying to maximize our returns for our investors and, of course, looking at making sure that we pay everything before the end of the concessions. From so far, we haven't seen any big risks ahead of us. I'm here representing the investors who are with us online, and they asked us about capital raising efforts. They want to know how we have conducted those efforts. I know you had a recent report, but we'd like to know more about that and how we are planning our efforts before the next auction. Yes. Part of our annual plan is to identify when we should be raising capital, given the project that we currently have.
An important thing to say is that our projects are not always, they don't always follow the timeline. We have to raise capital and then pay our expenses at different moments in time. We have to know when the money will actually be needed. We do not raise capital before really needing to pay those expenses. We look at the best opportunities to then go for second or third rounds to see what are the best capital raising windows that we can benefit from. We did that in January this year. We are usually the first company to do so, to issue the first incentivized bonds. We did that in January. We did so again for ANANÁI PARAGUAÇU, a project that we have some partial participation in, and we issued some bonds mid-year.
We are also looking at our cash flow to make sure that dividends can be anticipated and can also be paid earlier to TAESA, so it did not have to go to the market to raise more capital. We also took part in an R$800 million operation in July. Whenever we go to the market to raise capital, we plan things ahead of time. Everything is very well designed, and it's part of our annual and multi-annual plans. The incentivized bonds that were issued gave us the opportunity to also swap some of our resources into CDI. We were able to get good interest rates, and we were able to actually benefit from our derivatives through the swap. It's hard to explain volatility in a transmission.
Operation, which tends to be very predictable, so we actually worked to convince the players. We are now planning to issue new bonds to help us raise capital for the projects that are ongoing. We still have $800 million in backlog that we are now planning to get everything done by the end of the year. We hope that the government won't levy taxes on incentivized bonds, given the fact that next year we will be raising capital again, but it is an election year, so we have to be ready to really benefit the most out of the windows we are going to have ahead of us. What's your target capital raising? We're talking between BRL 3.4 billion-BRL $5 billion. We were at BRL 4.1 billion in the last quarter, but I think we're going to get to BRL 4.2 billion.
We still have some expenses that have to be paid with regard to the projects that are currently ongoing. That is like BRL 300 million out of the BRL 400 million that we have, BRL 370 million are going to come in in the first quarter, in the first half of 2026. We usually talk about the higher the leveraging number four because that's what allows us to really get back on track as fast as possible. We really trust our implementation team as well, which is super helpful because they help us to prepare for the auction so that we can deliver results before ANEEL's CapEx deadline with great execution. Of course, things may change in one way or another, but in any way, we keep track of our projects very closely, and we have been very successful in our implementation projects so far.
Our target is between BRL 3.5 billion-BRL 4 billion, and we see the opportunity to therefore go into other options because we know the payments usually take place within 18 months when we already have the money back.
A quick question. We talked a lot about CapEx for reinforcements and improvements. This is something we have discussed here as well before. Do you know how much we'll be spending CapEx in that sense to be part of that strategy that you were mentioning?
Okay. In our strategic plan, we believe that the company should have growth levers that come from reinforcements and improvements, and from auctions as well. When we model and plan the next 10 years, we look at both of these levers. We are excited by the end of the year. We're going to bring you better visibility on those numbers.
Luis mentioned, for example, that we are now looking into a few dozen reinforcement projects that will help us to get better RAP. The implementation team is also looking into larger projects that are still under discussion and waiting approval. We will show you more details soon. The same thing will be true for the indemnity amounts that we are to be paid. We are moving tables again.
[Foreign language] A galera não precisa sair dos lugares, podem ficar aí que agora a gente vai fazer o nosso encerramento. Espero que vocês tenham aproveitado muito esse momento de troca. Acho que é ótimo momento, não só para a companhia, mas para o mercado, para os analistas e investidores. Essa troca, eu acho que é sempre muito rica. Queria agradecer também não só os presentes aqui, como também o pessoal que está remoto. Espero que vocês tenham também tirado suas dúvidas. A gente vai encerrar aqui. Eu gostaria de chamar ao palco a nossa Diretora Financeira para fazer o seu fechamento e suas considerações finais. Catia Pereira, por favor.
[Foreign language] Agora já estamos se aproximando da boa tarde ou ainda não, ainda estamos no bom dia? Bom, gente, primeiro agradecer a confiança de todos vocês, o tempo, a disponibilidade. Eu acho que aqui é muito mais momento da companhia prestar contas para os nossos acionistas.
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and to hear the questions for our investors. I think we have an opportunity to share our strategies with you of where we are versus where we are headed. Touching base on our key pillars: efficiency, innovation, ensuring sustainable results, and distributing dividends to our shareholders. We are committed to properly managing our cash flow. We must be a resilient company to face any and all challenges that will come. The macroeconomic situation in Brazil is quite complicated. Until the moment we enroll or apply to an auction, until the moment we actually implement projects, we see many changes. Thank you so much for any and all partners of TAESA, our investors that are here in person or online. To our employees, our stakeholders, our daily commitment, and to everyone we serve. Thank you so much for trusting us.
We will have new opportunities in the future, and our IR team will be at your disposal, so just reach out if you have any questions. Thank you for your final remarks, Catia . We will now have the final survey. You can scan the QR code here. Those that are attending remotely, just scan the QR code also, or you can scan the QR code on the website to answer the survey. Thank you so much. I personally really enjoyed the experience today, and I hope to see you on next TAESA's Investors Day. Thank you so much.