Good morning, ev.ryone, welcome to Ørsted's Capital Markets Day 2023. My name is Rasmus Hærvig, and I'm the Head of the Investor Relations team. We are very pleased to have you all with us here at the Science Museum and all you joining us on the web stream. Safety is an integrated part at everything we do at Ørsted. That applies to everywhere we are, it also applies here today. Before I will let Mads enter the stage, I will do a safety briefing. There are no alarms or drills planned for the duration of our event, if the alarm sounds, please don't use the lift, but follow the security personnel, who will guide you down the staircase and into the muster points, which are found outside the group entrance. The fire exits are labeled to your left, my right.
Throughout the day, we will host six presentations. We will show you three different videos. The total program is scheduled for around four hours. At around 11:30 A.M., we will have a coffee break, which will take place downstairs. The final hour is reserved for a Q&A. After the Q&A session, everyone at the Science Museum is invited for lunch and networking downstairs. Thank you, all of you, for coming and for joining us. I hope you will enjoy the program.
Good morning, and a very warm welcome to all of you in the room, also to all of you joining us online. It is fantastic that you're with us, and we are happy that you're going to spend the next four hours with us. Sorry about that. We good? Sorry about that. We live in an industry which enjoys huge support, is hugely attractive, and is extremely important. We are convinced, as a company, that we can create growth, that we can drive significant value creation, not least, that we can continue to shape that industry in a direction where it becomes even more scalable.
We are extremely happy, in my team, to tell you about this in this very venue, in the Science Museum, because this is where lots of children around the world, young people, are indeed coming every year to learn about creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. That's exactly some of the traits that we deploy when we drive towards becoming the world's green energy major. We will spend the next hours telling you about just that. Without further ado, let us dive into the program, unless I need some help with technicalities. Not better, is it? It is better. Very good. Without further ado, we will we'll take a look at the broader world that we live in. The executive summary is, we are not on the path that we need to be to going towards a net zero world by 2050.
We are not on the path to 1.5 degree scenario. Another fact which is undisputed is that the energy sector, so the production and consumption of energy, is at the very, very centerpiece of whether we will succeed to create a livable planet or not. If we don't, not to spell doom and gloom, but fact is that both human beings, our nature, and our planet will suffer unrepairable consequences for millions, if not billions. At the same time, even if you, against all expectations, would not care at all about some of those devastating consequences, even the economic consequences of inaction would be terrible. The great news is, we have that action, and we have the opportunity to do something about that as an industry, as humanity, but also for us as a company. We can influence that direction of travel.
If we look at the vision that we have, that we launched already many years ago, that is a world that runs entirely on green energy. You will notice, as I'm sure, this is not a vision about Ørsted. This is not about vision about us as a company. This is a vision about a world that we are a contributor or a catalyst for change becomes possible. It may seem inconceivable, it may seem extremely difficult, but we are firm believers it is indeed possible. We are in an industry right now in renewable energy, which is undergoing fundamental change, even in recent times. What I'll share with you is that most of those challenges and changes are actually to the benefit of a company like Ørsted.
If you look at it, the just the recent very tragic events with a, with a war on the European continent and many other events and the following energy crisis, now means that we that, renewable energy rollout is no longer just about climate policy. It is also very much about affordability and energy security. That means that the political support, essentially both from regulators, but from everybody in society, is bigger than it ever has been. That is materializing into tangible support schemes like the Inflation Reduction Act, like the Net Zero Industry Act in Europe, and many other things around the world. We are seeing some dramatic developments, both in terms of cost of capital, but also in CapEx inflation, which leads to an unavoidable increase in levelized cost of electricity.
As we will share with you in the rest of this program, that also means that the preparedness of customers and states to pay more for that energy is definitely also there, and in that sense, is a manageable consequence. What is some of the underlying things that are good about the increasing LCOE is that that needs to happen. I'm sure that all of you are aware of, we don't have a healthy and scalable supply chain today, but with increasing LCOEs, with the inflation that may seem like a big challenge right now, we are also creating a healthy and scalable industry, which will have the financial performance and the capitalization to scale to what needs to get done in the coming years.
We are also seeing that the society around us is continuing the journey of electrification, and even in the hard-to-electrify sectors, such as shipping, steel, and others, we are also seeing that the real tangible demand signals for renewable molecule-based solutions, as my colleague Olivia will talk about, is increasing extremely steeply, coming from virtually almost nothing. Last but not least, some of the other dramatic developments happening in our industry, which we also see as a good thing, is that some of the necessary complexity that we are seeing with such as systems integration and also protecting nature or biodiversity as we roll out renewable energy, are adding a level of complexity, which plays to the strengths of an experienced and capable player like ourselves.
Even those developments are indeed dramatic and profound, not least over the last 12 months, we are in a position where we think by far the majority of these plays to the strengths and will create an even greater opportunity set for a company like Ørsted. That also means, in totality, that the growth that we're looking at is even bigger than what we told you about in the Capital Markets Day a couple of years back. The little numbers that we have in the light blue boxes are behind me, shows what we estimated both for offshore, onshore, and not for, not for Power-to-X, because that number has grown so much. Essentially, now we're looking at six times the current size of installed capacity in just seven years in offshore.
We are looking at just with expectation compared to two years, a doubling, a further doubling of onshore capacity, not least driven by very profound initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, which of course means that the thrust we have behind rolling out the renewable energy is even bigger. The opportunities that we have here is massive. Speaking to a company which majority of our business is still offshore, just looking at the North Sea Declaration that recently happened with the countries around the North Sea, that alone is an ambition of 120 GW by 2030. That's a huge, huge opportunity set for a company like Ørsted. Of course, we won't do that alone, but being able to get a fair share of highly value-creating projects is something we think is more possible than ever before.
If you look at capacity growth, we actually have an offshore, we've delivered an increase in awarded capacity of over 7.5 GW, including the world's to-be largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 3. We have also continued our very successful farm-down model with a net sell-down of 2.2 GW of capacity, with a continued approximately or even above 100% net present value retention. Although that might seem small, we also think it's pretty groundbreaking that we managed to take one of the very few final investment decisions in Power-to-X, with what we firmly believe is one of Europe's, if not the world's, largest e-methanol facility, albeit only with 70 MW.
Right now, in Power-to-X, there's a lot more talk than action, and we believe in action much more than talk. That has led us to a position, which we also expected, as an absolutely undisputed number one in offshore wind. As a matter of fact, our total portfolio, if you look at what is in operation, what is under construction, and what is awarded, is more than twice as big as number two, a position that is not weakened since our last Capital Markets Day, despite the massive industrial growth. We also see that our journey to become a very significant regional player in onshore is continuing, and we are seeing that what we had ambition to be, namely a market shaper in Power-to-X, is indeed also happening.
Very importantly, not least for the audience that we have today, we are also on track on the targets that we set out financially. We are on track to deliver the approximately 50 GW we set, but also a meaningful over-delivery on the earnings growth, the EBITDA growth annual, which is now an estimated 15% compared to the around 12% that we targeted, and this is a comparable period, so up to 2027. Likewise, for Return on Capital Employed, where we targeted 11%-12%, right now we're looking at approximately 15%. What those inflationary effects and the power price developments have done is that despite some of the cost increases we are seeing, we are seeing a very meaningful uplift in revenue, and therefore, also in the earnings.
We are also, very importantly, on track, despite the events where we were ordered to keep our last coal-fired power plant alive for an additional year, we are also on track to deliver on our scope 1 and 2 net zero ambition by 2025, which is the most ambitious target of any decent-sized utility in the world. We are looking to create value in every single dimension of our portfolio. If you look at our portfolio in total in these four buckets, if you start on the left behind me, that is our operational portfolio. That's a key driver, obviously, of value creation that I just talked about with the meaningful overperformance.
That is where inflation indexing, that is where higher PPA prices and higher power prices are driven higher revenue, and therefore, a significant additional earnings than what we had expected. Also, in the under-construction portfolio, where we have approximately 5 GW, t hat is where that entire portfolio is comfortably within our guided range of 150-300 basis points spread to WACC, with an unlevered, fully loaded, base IRR, lifecycle IRR. This is something that is extremely important to us, that you, as our investors, can trust that we take a final investment decision. We are creating value.
The awarded portfolio that we have, where we have not yet taken an FID, is obviously, that's not a surprise to anyone, that is where we have some of the bigger challenges, especially in the areas, that will be the U.S. portfolio. We will come back to that. That is where we have a fixed nominal offtake price have had a higher cost of capital and higher CapEx inflation. That is where we are committing firmly to take all the actions needed, that is both in terms of our supply chain and regulatory, also taking active choices to reconfigure projects, like, for example, we announced recently with our Baltica 3 project.
As Rasmus will tell you about, that project was actually NPV positive, but just not good enough to take an FID, which is why we took a decision to reconfigure the project. You'll hear more details about that later. The last bucket is what we have not yet won yet, but that is where we have well above 100 GW of high-quality pipeline to pick from, and we are recommitting, as we'll tell you later, we are recommitting to an absolute industry-leading 150-300 basis points spread to WACC, and we are also committing and convinced that we can deliver a future portfolio which will deliver within that, not least due to the fact that the prices and the revenue is also going up, delivering higher absolute IRRs despite the higher cost of capital.
All in all, across all these four buckets, convinced that we are in an extremely strong position to drive value creation. As I mentioned, let me take a little bit of a deeper dive into what are we doing with the awarded portfolio, which is where we are fighting the hardest to ensure that we come to the place we want them to be.
Well, we are working intensely with our supply chain, and for some of these projects, quite honestly, we are going back to our majors and most important and biggest suppliers saying, "You need to help us find additional cost savings that can improve these projects." That's an active dialogue that's been well received, professionally received, and our suppliers are leaning in to say: What can we do to ensure that we get to a better cost position in light of the CapEx inflation that we have seen?
We're also in continuous dialogue with the regulators, and very tangible examples of that would be the POWER Act from Maryland, where recently, the state of Maryland, where we have our Skipjack project, approved that there would now be a full passback of Inflation Reduction Act benefits, which, of course, is a huge uplift, because previously, there was an 80% passback clause of those benefits to the ratepayers. We are seeing that the heavy lifting we are doing on the regulatory front actually delivers tangible benefits, and as you may have noticed, might not, we've also, as late as yesterday, actually officially filed a petition to get a retrospective inflation indexing for the Sunrise Project in New York, which would be a meaningful uplift to the OREC price, should that be approved.
We continue those dialogues and do clearly meet a strong reception and understanding that something needs to happen. We also generally pursue revenue optimization, because in some cases, there will be a limit to how much we can do about the CapEx. The revenue optimization, driven by the merchant flexibility that we have, but also driven by driving highly value-creating power purchase agreements with big companies. I will mention just one, which I think is an interesting data point, namely, that we've seen just over the last 12 months, the PPA levels, price levels, have gone up by 50%-60%, even in light of the softening power prices that we've seen recently.
We are still at very meaningfully higher PPA levels than we have seen before, which is yet another strong indicator of us being able to deliver stronger revenue. Some of these projects, we still have that opportunity. As I mentioned, we are reconfiguring some of our projects, there will typically be those where we do have limited sunk cost where we still have some flexibility on the timeline. Examples of that would be Baltica 3, but also our Ocean Wind 2 project in the U.S., which David will come back to. Last but not least, that may be a new word here from us, we're also explicitly saying, if we not get our projects to sufficient value creation and therefore not be a responsible use of our investors' money, we are prepared to walk away from these projects.
We will come back to that throughout this, but not least in David's presentation, because this is primarily a U.S. challenge. Now, if you look at the position we have both for the award portfolio but also in general, we find ourselves in a uniquely strong position to continue to drive competitive advantages and drive growth. If you look at the commercial dimension first, our ability to continue to develop and drive highest quality pipeline is something we have absolutely no doubt is industry-leading, not least in offshore, where we are obviously both the biggest and the most experienced player in the world. We have seen just since the last Capital Markets Day, our total pipeline go up by 70%, so that's a very massive increase.
You'll also see us, we talked about that quite a bit, to be us continuing to be extremely disciplined in our bidding. We chose not to bid, for example, in Massachusetts. We chose not to bid in Taiwan round 3-1. We did not bid in California seabed. We stepped out in time in the New York Bight seabed lease auctions, and we also have recently decided to step down our market development activities in Vietnam because we do not believe that compared to the other opportunities that we have, that Vietnam is a sufficiently attractive market. It's still a really important supplier market, but for market development, we are pulling back from that to prioritize other areas with higher value creation potential. We're also very confident in our proven flexible financing approach, i.e., our farm-down model.
As I mentioned, we have farmed down effectively 2.2 GW at very high retention rate. We see no reason, we have no indications that that is weakening, despite the obvious tighter capital markets that we are looking at. Last but not least, and this is something we will believe will be only more important in the future, our relations to the corporate partners, to strategic partnerships with the likes of Amazon, with BASF. Amazon, we're doing PPAs, and we have other really exciting initiatives. We just made with the carbon capture and storage project that we won, Denmark's first and largest, where we'll capture more than 400,000 tons of biogenic CO2 every year. We made the world's largest negative emissions offtake agreement with Microsoft, with over 3 million tons of biogenic CO2.
We are, as you are surely aware, we have the world's largest corporate PPA with TSMC for 920 MW. We are convinced that continuing to not only trade with those partners, but innovate new solutions that will benefit what we do across technologies, is something that is a unique capability that we possess. If we turn to the EPC and operations area, we are in a position where both our technical skills but also our execution ability is very strong. My colleagues, Virginie and Richard, will come back to that in much more detail. This.
I'll just mention that despite the fact that delays that we have had on Changhua, project 1 and 2A, but also on Hornsea 2, obviously have raised questions saying, "Is Ørsted losing its execution ability?" We would argue every day of the week that that is not the case. Just take Hornsea 2 as an example. Under extremely challenging circumstances, where we had an Omicron outbreak, it was hard to man the ships. We had an extreme weather in February. All of those factors, we managed to be only two months delayed on the world's largest offshore wind farm. As a matter of fact, we were the only U.K. infrastructure construction project without one single shutdown during the entire COVID period. I would claim that we still have a clearly and market-leading execution ability, which we'll continue to leverage and continue to strengthen.
As mentioned, we will clearly come back to that. Very importantly, and maybe even more important than it's ever been before, our long-standing relations to our supply chain is extremely important. Virginie will tell you more about it, but we have a very high share of contracted CapEx already booked and with a price certainty going into the portfolio we need to build. Both the trust that we have the relations, both also the scale we can offer and the technical capabilities where we lean in to help our supply chain scale. We have multiple examples of what we have done to not just get our fair share of the total capacity, but also how we help the supply chain scale to the greater good of the entire scalability of our supply chain.
Last but not least, I will mention something that has become increasingly clear in its importance, is a regulatory strength that we have. The way we can work with regulators to create a more scalable, a better, and a more attractive condition for our industry and for Ørsted, not least in the U.S., but also examples in Poland, where we work with our partner, PGE, and other industry actors to ensure that we can euro-denominate the income which significantly lowers the risk-adjusted cost of capital. All in all, with these as examples, you can trust us to both continue to have, deploy, and develop the absolutely market-leading capabilities that we are sure that we have.
If you look at our ability to deploy those capabilities, we have recently taken a decision to restructure the way we go to market, or in essence, we've had that we are now looking at the world, not primarily in technology, so in offshore and onshore and Power-to-X, but we integrated onshore and offshore into three regions, so Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Why are we doing that? It is simply because to ensure we are seeing that the markets are becoming increasingly different, and we have been extremely successful for years exporting, you can call it simplified, a North Sea model for offshore, taking that to other parts of the world. Due to political priorities, local considerations about supply chain, it's becoming increasingly difficult and different to navigate.
By giving a much higher degree of empowerment to our regional setups across technologies and leveraging those synergies, we can work much closer, both regulatory, but commercially with customers, bringing us closer to the customers in each of those regions, with, as mentioned, a higher empowerment to the CEOs and the teams of each of the three regions. At the same time, we are choosing to keep our EPC organization as a global organization, which will marshal the scale, but also the deployment of the capabilities, which would not be wise to copy everywhere. The capabilities you need to deploy a massive infrastructure project on time and on budget are not that different, but working with your customers, your stakeholders, your regulators, is indeed very different.
That is how we find the best of working with market proximity, but at the same time, also to ensure that we work with scale and deploying the capabilities we built up over several decades. We are also keeping our Power-to-X organization global, because that is a market that does not exist. As it said on my previous slide, where I talked about growth, this is a market that has less than 1 GW of operational electrolyzer capacity right now. We aim to be a catalyst for making that happen, and we aim to work with off-takers that are, in many cases, really global.
That means that a global model where we can deploy learnings across the world because we don't have the regional scale yet, is something that we believe would bring us in the best position to successfully deploy, but also scale in a risk-mitigated way, the new technologies, both on electrolysis, but also working with off-takers, and if we use green fuels, the synthesis processes. Let's take a look at the choices we are making, starting with offshore. Offshore, extremely important that we have absolutely no doubt about our ambition to stay and strengthen our position as a global leader.
We are not concerned about that that will not be the case, because as I mentioned, we are well over twice as big as numbertwo today, and we uphold extremely high ambitions to ensure that we continue to drive and shape that market. We will be extremely focused on value creation. We'll have a disciplined bidding approach, and we will also ensure, as we already announced a couple of years back, to dive into a focused and prioritized deployment of floating technology. We have the U.K., Spain, and Norway as our priority markets right now, but we'll also keep our eyes open to high-potential opportunities in Asia Pacific. On onshore, we will be looking at continuing to strengthen ourselves as a significant regional player. U.S. will continue to be our main growth market in onshore, but we're also choosing to play in the top priority European markets.
As a matter of fact, the five markets that we are prioritizing, four of those are the four largest markets in Europe. We believe there's very big potential of that, not least in wake of the energy crisis, that we, even though it doesn't feel that way, surely still have in Europe, and that holds a huge potential, which we are already seeing materializing in significant value creation and a strongly increasing pipeline, as Rasmus will come back to. We are also very happy about the diversified earnings that we have due to both the different load profiles, but also the different timelines that we're all aware of is between onshore and offshore. Not least on Power-to-X, we will be a market shaper, or as we said a few times, we'll be a catalyst for change.
We will do that in a risk-sensible way. We're not going out from zero to several GW and saying we'll build the huge projects right away. As Olivia will tell you about, we like to take a very risk-mitigated approach to the small and medium-sized projects to ensure we get the learnings to scale. We will be very selective in the way we do this. We will be working in a few European countries and the U.S. in a hub structure, which will ensure that we will actually create impact where we choose to operate.
We'll primarily focus on renewable hydrogen for industrials, not least in Germany, and then we'll focus on e-methanol, which also a recent report from Shell showed is probably the most scalable of the near-term fuels that we could see, for example, for a sector like shipping. Let us turn and take a look at what that means in terms of the plan that we have. The total self-funded plan, and I want to reiterate that, the total self-funded plan, is one that is still at, approximately 50 GW. It is largely unchanged. As a matter of fact, it is completely unchanged on the 50 GW but we are doing some adjustments in the technology mix behind it.
You will notice that we are now being explicit for the first time on Power-to-X, where we say around 2 GW of operational electrolyzer capacity, which may not sound like a lot, but considering that the total global electrolyzer capacity is well below 1 GW, it is not unambitious, but still something we believe and are convinced can be done in a risk-mitigated and a wise way. You will also notice, obviously, that offshore going from approximately 30 GW to now approximately 28 GW. You could say, "Is this because you needed to find for something for Power-to-X, or is it because you cannot afford it within your capital structure?" Fact is that this is a direct result of us taking a very high priority to value creation.
When we say we choose to reconfigure a few projects, that also means that we do not now, right now, not have a known timeline for those projects, and we do not want to let ourselves forced to do projects that we are sure we could grow with, but would not create sufficient value for our investors. This is a reflection that we are convinced we can deliver approximately 28 GW of value-creating offshore, and we are strong believers of the long-term value creation in offshore. We have no doubt that that is the case, and we'll come back to, in greater detail, why we believe that is the case. Right now, towards 2030, we believe this plan is the best we can deliver, focusing on value creation, which is an absolute top priority right now.
We'll have Europe being the biggest region in terms of CapEx, closely followed by the U.S. If we look at what CapEx that drives, surely not a surprise, because I'm sure you've been flipping the deck from this morning. We are looking at an approximately 475 billion DKK investment program. This is one that will surely make us one of the largest green energy investors in the world, if not the largest. You will still see that approximately 70%, so by far the majority, goes into offshore. Even though we are deploying capital to Power-to-X, even though we are still very ambitious on our onshore, there's no doubt that the majority of our CapEx deployment is still in offshore.
By the way, in offshore, that delivers a very high degree, continued very high degree of contracted, and known earnings for the future. This is an area where we'll be ambitiously driving forward, and we are convinced that we can do this in a value-creating way. In terms of our value-creating ambitions, as I mentioned, we are firmly committed to an industry-leading 150 to 300 basis point spread to WACC. I want to reiterate, even though I'm sure it is known to you, based on the unlevered, fully loaded lifecycle IRR, we are not in a position where we can compare those return requirements to those of our peers.
Daniel will give you more detail about it, but if we actually take out those CapEx and fixed costs, this is not a comparable figure. This is a very ambitious value creation range. We are convinced we can do that because the absolute IRRs that we can deliver are some where we are already now seeing the data points coming. I mentioned the 50%-60% PPA levels going up, but also just a data point from the recent Irish OREC auction in offshore. That was at EUR 87 or EUR 86 per megawatt hour. That's a totally different level than we've seen, for example, in the U.K. Strong indications that we are seeing those price levels go up.
If we look at what that will result in, the earnings that we're looking at, I'll take you back just briefly to remind you that what we communicated last time at our CMD was an approximately 12% earnings growth towards 2027. We are now looking at a meaningfully higher earnings growth towards 2030, and we're also looking at a higher return on capital. This is, as Daniel will tell you more about, with a very high degree of certainty. We have a very high share of those operational earnings already with a clear visibility, although it is seven years out into the future.
We believe very healthy returns based on also assumptions that the value we will create from the new projects and where we will get to with our existing projects is something that will be strongly value creating. Let me now turn to another extremely important priority, namely sustainability. Sustainability is at the very core of our strategy. It is not something we do on the side. It's not a department. It's at the very core of how we actually do things, and we continue to be an absolute leader in terms of the ambitions that we set. If you look at our I already mentioned the Scope 1 and 2, carbon neutrality by 2025. We were one of only 7 companies in the world across all sectors who got our Net Zero 2040 plan science-based approved.
We'll show you a video with my colleague, Ingrid, later, actually what we do, but also on nature-based, so on biodiversity. We already announced previously that we will do no projects where we do not have a net positive biodiversity effect, and we, as late as a couple of days ago, announced also that not only ban of landfill of turbine blades, but also of solar panels, where we're already now working with partners to have the technical solution to make that reusable. On the social dimension, just one example of that, we have an ambitious 40/ 60 split between gender, with the underrepresented gender, and that is both at total employee base, but also at all leadership positions. On the governance side, we will only be deploying sustainable green financing, and we have all of our projects taxonomy-aligned.
Those are only examples of our industry-leading ambitions, and we are taking action to drive these. Just a couple of examples would be the global partnership that we have done with World Wildlife Fund, which is focused on creating both measures, but also to create tangible and scalable action, not just for us, but for the entire industry and ocean biodiversity. Our oceans are not in a great shape, and we need to do something around that in a way that is scalable. Likewise, with The Nature Conservancy, we've donated 1,000 acres of rare long grass prairie as part of one of our solar projects to The Nature Conservancy for conservation. That's not something we do for philanthropy.
That is because we are convinced it's both the right thing to do, and because we believe this will be an ever more important part of creating both competitive advantage, differentiation, and the acceptance both of our customers and our investors. Talking about ocean biodiversity, I'm extremely proud to announce that we are now the first energy company in the world who is issuing a blue bond, so focusing investment or the capital that we raise, EUR 100 million, on ocean biodiversity activities and decarbonizing the maritime sector, so specifically targeted that. This is something that we need a lot more, because we need to have scalable financing to deploy into not least ocean biodiversity and making our oceans healthy.
We are proud to, once again, be a world's first on something we believe will be a massive factor in scaling something that's gonna be important, extremely important, for all of us. Closely, before I finish, let me talk about people, because without people, without the talent in the organization, with the partners we work with, and also with our customers, we are not able to deliver what we need to. We take lots of very tangible and industry-leading initiatives, and I'll just give you a few data points around that. We have a global graduate program with sort of, with a limited number of positions. We got 4,200 global applicants from all over the world for that. That was a 50% increase over the year before.
This is an indication that the number of top-quality people who wants to work for the industry leader, who is one of the very few absolute pure players in renewables, is massive. Also for the people we already have working for us at all leadership levels, we have systematic programs for how to develop, train, and challenge that talent. This is something that is we are convinced is an absolute top rate across any company in the world. This leads, just as though with those examples, this leads to also us focusing very much on saying, "So what is the attrition that we have?" Because as most companies during the pandemic saw, this curve is saying, first nobody left, and then everybody left. We had what I think Harvard Business School called the Great Resignation.
We are seeing that steadily come down, and that is also a result of the well above benchmark that we have in employee motivation and satisfaction. Last but not least, I'll mention that on diversity, equity, and inclusion, we take lots of initiatives, including having what we call employee-driven inclusion networks, which is a way to mobilize and engage our employees from all over the world in ensuring that we become an even more inclusive workplace. With that, let me sum up what I'm essentially telling you in this very first part as an appetizer to the rest of the program. We will, in our business, and not least in our offshore business, be driving towards a very selective approach with a very strong focus on value creation.
We will maintain, if not strengthen, our global leadership in offshore wind in all three regions. We will continue to strengthen our position as a significant regional and selective player in onshore, and continue to be a market shaper in Power-to-X. We will deploy our massive pipeline, well over a 100 GW pipeline, to ensure that we deliver the approximately 50 GW of operational capacity per year. That will, by the way, not just be 50 GW that's comparable to everybody else, because a majority is offshore with much higher load factors, we will be at significantly one of the most, the biggest producers of green power in the world, even though we might not have the highest gigawatt number in installed capacity due to the technology mix that we have.
Last but not least, we will deliver significant earnings and capital growth, capital return growth. As Danny will tell you more about, we will also uphold and prolong our dividend commitment to give that certainty for our investors as well. All of this to become what we clearly aim to be, namely, the world's leading green energy major. With that, let me hand over Reumert and move on. We will be going into the rest of the program, so hope that at least gives you an overview, that you know the overall direction of travel before we go into more detail. Thank you very much.
Blades, towers, foundations, cables, vessels, all fundamental in building new offshore wind farms to provide the world with the green energy it needs. Producing steel and blades and powering vessels are sources of greenhouse gas emissions. As we accelerate the build-out of green energy, it is vital to reduce these emissions in our supply chains. In fact, this is one of the biggest challenges we face to meeting our industry-leading target of building net zero wind farms by 2040. To overcome it, we need to take action with our partners. As the world's largest offshore wind developer, we can lead our industry by creating incentives for our suppliers to invest in low-carbon technologies. That is why we are partnering with our strategic suppliers to mature and test low-carbon solutions in our wind farms, so they become commercially scalable.
We are focusing on the major emissions drivers across the life cycle of a wind farm, from blades and towers to foundations, cables, and vessels. Let's have a closer look at the industry-first solutions we are developing with our partners to tackle emissions. The largest source of an offshore wind farm's carbon emissions comes from the steel that goes into its foundations. By using renewable energy when manufacturing foundation components, we can address this issue. We are pleased to announce that we are now partnering with Dillinger to develop the world's first low-carbon foundations made with renewable hydrogen and scrap steel. The second-largest source of emissions comes from the fuels used by the vessels at our offshore wind farms. To address this issue, we will be testing crew transfer vessels that run on electricity and e-methanol.
We will operate them at full scale in our wind farm operations at Barrow and Lincs in the U.K. Many of the blades in operation today need to be recycled soon, but blades are made of composite materials that are difficult to recycle. This is the biggest circularity challenge facing our industry. To address this, we are pleased to announce that we are entering an industry-first partnership with Vestas. Vestas has developed a new technology that can break down the composite materials in existing blades and use the recovered epoxy resin to manufacture new blades. When ready, we will procure and install these blades made with recycled materials in all future wind farms where we collaborate. When looking at an entire wind farm, these solutions have the potential to significantly reduce emissions.
Together with our partners, we are driving the integration of new low-carbon solutions in a cost-efficient way and building the capabilities to continue future-proofing our world-class operating model. Ultimately, these initiatives will enable us to meet future customer demand for decarbonized wind farms.
Hello, everyone. My name is Rasmus Errboe. I am the CEO of our European business. I have been with Ørsted for a little bit more than 11 years in many different roles, most recently as the regional head for Continental Europe. I will spend my time today giving you a strategic update on how we are doing in Europe as of now. I would like to start out by giving you a snapshot overview of our portfolio, as it stands right now, followed by a quick walk-through of what we have achieved since the last Capital Markets Day. We constructed the first wind farm offshore in the world more than 30 years ago, we have today 27 operational wind farms across Europe.
That makes us a major green power producer, and it also makes us the undisputed regional leader of offshore wind in Europe. What it also does is that it allows us to compete from a position of strength, and we do so due to the depth of our capability and also simply due to the size of our portfolio. e have roughly 18 GW of what we call firm capacity in Europe right now. 15, a little bit more than 15 offshore, 1 GW onshore, and 2 GW in our Danish bioenergy business. Before I go through the list here, I would like to leave you with one point.
During the last couple of years, we all know that Europe has been going through unprecedented turmoil in the energy markets, and to me, it speaks quite a bit to our capability as an organization, that during this period of time, we have been able to deliver on all of our key milestones. It gives me personally a very strong conviction in our ability to continue to deliver going forward. What I will do now is start looking ahead. I would like to take you through our four key strategic priorities for Europe for the next 12-24 months. First of all, we will deliver on our awarded portfolio with sufficient value creation, i.e., Hornsea 3 and Baltica 2 and 3.
I will, of course, come back to this. Number two, we will win up to 6 GW of offshore wind capacity, and we will do so using multiple different avenues. Centralized tenders, decentralized tenders, greenfield, open door, developer-led build-out, finding the best way to the most value-creating green electron for Ørsted. Number three, we will leverage the onshore platform we have now established throughout the last two years and deliver another 3 GW of value-creating growth. Finally, we will lead the structural shift that we are seeing right now towards more corporate-led demand and deliver on our strategic corporate partners' decarbonization needs. I will now double-click on number one, starting with Hornsea 3. We continue to progress Hornsea 3. We expect to take FID during 2023.
On value creation, we expect the value to progress towards our guided range, through lever maturation and, in general, further maturation of the project on scope, schedule, and cost. I am firmly convinced that we will get there. There are specifically three areas that we are spending a lot of time on right now. First of all, on the whole CapEx part, we are working hard with our suppliers to get the needed robustness in the case and get a very high proportion of secured CapEx on price and also on volume, building further on the two-thirds that we had secured at FID last year. Secondly, we should remember that this is a massive offshore wind farm that is part of the biggest offshore wind cluster in the world.
That also means that we see significant scale benefits on this farm, and we continue to build on that. To illustrate my point with an example, our OpEx per megawatt on this offshore wind farm is more than 25% lower than what it is on Hornsea 2, driven by turbine scale, but also the cluster effects. Last but not least, on revenue, we have a CFD contract here that provides you with a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can do on corporate PPAs, on delaying the CFD. Especially on corporate PPAs, we have an option in the framework to basically pass back up to 25% of the CFD, and then either take that merchant or through corporate PPAs, which we would obviously only do if it would improve our business case.
With all of these things, as I said before, that gives me a strong conviction that we will get there. Moving on to Baltica 2 and 3 in Poland, the other half, roughly, of our awarded capacity. We entered into the JV on this project two and a half years ago, roughly. In other words, just before the world in terms of the energy market, fundamentally changed in Europe, and also very much in Poland, in terms of the depreciation of the zloty. Fortunately, due to our leading development capabilities, we were able to see the writing on the wall very, very early on these projects. Together with our partner, PGE and other incumbents, we managed to agree with the Polish government to make some very fundamental changes to the CFD with retrospective effect.
Due to these changes, we are now at a place where we see sufficient value creation in Baltica 2, so that is 1.5 GW out of the 2.5, and we are moving that project forward according to plan towards expected COD in 2027. As Mads also alluded to, on Baltica 3, the story is slightly different. Here, despite the fact that we actually do see a positive life cycle spread to WACC on this project, we have decided, together with our partner, to take a step back because it simply did not meet Ørsted's return requirements and reconfigure the project, taking advantage of the fact that we have flexibility on the timeline with the CFD the way it is. More specifically, what we are doing right now is three different things.
First of all, we are reopening the permit. We are seeing if we can reconfigure the project, potentially get a bigger turbine. We are canceling and retendering significant scopes, again, leveraging the flexibility on the timeline. Finally, we recently won another 210 MW of awarded capacity in Poland together with our partner, PGE, and we are exploring whether we can construct that together with Baltica 3 and then have a slightly bigger project, which would benefit the business case. That was an update on the awarded portfolio. I would like now sort of switch on to strategic portion number two, double-clicking on how do we get to the best and most value-creating green electrons for Ørsted?
Before I get into the details, I will just take a step back with you and provide you with a little bit of context. There is no doubt, as Mads also alluded to, that we are standing at the brink of a new era for offshore wind in Europe, no doubt about it. For me personally, I actually don't spend so much time thinking about whether the number behind me in 2030 installed capacity will be 130 or 140 or 150. In all scenarios, the growth will be massive. Where we do spend our time is finding the best GW in this space. Two words on the regulatory framework. Overall, we are pleased with what we are seeing across Europe with the multiple packages that has been coming out of the European Commission.
It is an evolution, it is not a revolution, but as I said, overall, we are pleased with the direction of travel. Where I would instead like to spend a good deal of my time, is to give you some insights into how do we think about the markets? How do we maneuver in this space of opportunity? The way we think about markets is that it is much, much more than a flag on a piece of paper. You need to carefully think about where you are and why. We focus our bottom-fixed offshore wind growth in five core markets, so the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Poland, centered around the Irish Sea, the North Sea, and the lower part of the Baltic Sea region.
To give you an indication of the numbers, we spend roughly 80% of our Dbx in 2023 in these markets. That also mean the vast majority of our time and our attention. We also are active in what we call new adjacent markets for bottom-fixed offshore wind. That would be Ireland, Belgium, Norway, and Sweden, and here we spend roughly 80% of our Dbx. Zooming in on the way we think about this, we carefully think about, I said, where we want to be. When we look at a market, we obviously look at the attractiveness, what is the robustness of the pipeline, what is the political stability, what is the transparency of the system, and so on.
What we also really test ourself on before we go in, and also when we decide to stay, is our ability to be a market shaper, not a taker, either in our own right or together with our partners. As you see with us partnering up with ESB in Ireland recently, BASF in Germany, in their home market, I will come back to that, PGE in Poland, the national incumbent, CIP on Danish open door, that's an important part for us to be a shaper. Finally, what we also look for, increasingly much actually, when we look at our portfolio, is not to be blinded by the tenders. I will come back to the tenders, we are looking for multiple avenues to the growth. We are looking for, as I said before, different kinds of auctions, greenfield, developer-led build-out, and so on.
Another thing that has fundamentally changed in Europe, due to the same drivers, of course, in the last couple of years, is the sheer volume of gigawatts for bottom-fixed offshore wind that is being tendered out in the short term. In the markets that are relevant for Ørsted, as I mentioned before, for the rest of 2023 and for 2024, we will see a total of roughly 44 GW being tendered out, so an average of 22 across the two years. A good question to me would be, How will you make sure that you can win that in the most value-creating manner? My answer to that would be fourfold. First of all, our leading development capabilities. We have been doing this longer than anybody else.
We have seen opportunities, we have seen more opportunities in Europe and globally than anybody else when it comes to offshore wind. We have a distinct capability to assess the opportunities and also do it early, see the risks, and also see the opportunities, and more importantly, to price the opportunities effectively. As a few examples, the view you might take on AEP, Annual Energy Production, the view you might take on the LCOE curves for the coming years, the view you might take on your ability to generate value from the merchant exposure, the value of the green electron or the molecule, those assumptions can make or break your business case in an afternoon. We know what we're doing. This is, I think, a very important point for you to be aware of here.
Secondly, on partnerships, we have the right partnerships in place, development partnerships, but also offtake partnerships. We have an ability to make them work for the longer term. Finally, as Richard and Virginie will also talk about, we simply just have scale that we can leverage across our entire value chain, but also simply in our market presence, synergy cases as an example. I would like to spend a little bit of time on floating before I then conclude on what does the pipeline look like for us in Europe for offshore wind in the coming years. The one-liner on floating is that things are going according to plan. We are delivering on the strategic trajectory that we set two years ago.
We are building our organization, we are staging our capability building, and we are building a portfolio with a lot of optionality, pre and post 2030, which is very important to us. More specifically, what we have done, is that we have also here decided to focus. We are in three markets. We are in Norway, the U.K., and Iberia. We have secured gross 1.1 GW in the U.K. of leases that we are now maturing together with our partners, and we have entered into four development partnerships in the markets that I just mentioned. Finally, we have also entered into a technology partnership with ACCIONA in Spain. If you put this together and give you a consolidated view on offshore for Europe towards 2030.
We have a little bit more than 15 GW in firm capacity. We have an ambition to get to 19 GW -21 GW by 2030 installed in the water, and that would mean that we have an ambition to get up to 6 GW of offshore wind. We can do that from a pipeline of roughly 6 GW of opportunity, roughly 40 GW in the core markets that I mentioned before, and then the remainder in our adjacent new markets. To me, this is a very, very robust pipeline. Moving on, and going into strategic priority number 3, which is on onshore. We have now, you can say, set ourselves up completely in Europe on onshore during the last couple of years.
We have done that centered around the two platform acquisitions we have done, one in Ireland and U.K., and one in Germany and France. On top of that, we have entered into Spain in our own right, and have entered into smaller development partnerships in Spain. I am incredibly pleased to see that e now have a team of almost 200 people working solely on onshore in Europe, and we have management teams in our onshore business with an average tenure of more than 20 years doing exactly this. I said we are present in five markets, and as Mads also alluded to, that constitutes the vast majority of the growth that we will see in Europe across onshore. When I say onshore, it is, of course, onshore wind, storage, and solar.
In terms of how we have been doing, we have increased our installed base with more than 30%. We now have 500 MW installed, and we are delivering very safely within our guided range in terms of value creation, both for our projects under construction and our avoided portfolio. Looking at the pipeline and our onshore value proposition. I said we have roughly one gigawatt of firm capacity now, and we will add another three to our pipeline towards 2030 installed capacity. We will do that from a pipeline of 9 GW, roughly, and that is a number that has significantly increased in the last couple of years.
In terms of our substantiated pipeline, that is predominantly onshore wind, but in our opportunity pipeline, you will see a roughly 50/50 split between onshore wind and solar and storage, because we firmly believe that that is the right direction for us to take. I can come back to that. Our value proposition in one line is our ground game. We are incredibly close to our markets. We have people on the ground who have been there for a very long time and who has been developing and executing onshore opportunities. We have, as I said before, the right partnerships in place. Finally, an important part of the why on onshore for us in Europe is the ability to move towards more integrated solutions across wind, solar, and storage.
To alleviate the grid constraints, which is an increasingly big issue, but also, frankly speaking, to meet the needs of our strategic corporate partners who are looking for profiles like that. That brings me to strategic priority number four, and the last one. We are convinced that over the next couple of decades, we will see a fundamental structural shift from, you can say, government-led demand into more corporate-led demand. In the future, what the customer would like to see is the developer's ability to deliver the green electron at the right place, at the right time, with the right price, and with the right profile. You can only do that if you have an integrated portfolio and an integrated capability. Also here, we are strategically focused. We really spent the time thinking about where do we want to be.
We have decided on focusing on only the largest strategic corporate partners. We have some criteria for that, companies that are shapers in their industry. We are focusing on global tech, steel, and chemicals. Just to put these numbers in perspective for you, so as a rule of thumb, the demand numbers we see here roughly equates 1,000 GW of offshore wind globally. Just to put it in perspective, the demand is huge. We are already very well on the way. It's not just a strategic commitment, that we have something we have decided to do only, we are doing it. We have entered into more than 1 GW of corporate PPAs, predominantly within these sectors, in the last couple of years in Europe.
Also, predominantly offshore, which distinguishes us from our colleagues in the industry quite a bit. Also, just as a data point, roughly two-thirds of those corporate PPAs have been entered into with strategic corporate partners, Amazon and Covestro. We have also concluded an equity partnership with German chemical company, BASF, the biggest one in the world, in their home market, to develop offshore wind together. Finally, we are collaborating quite a bit with our strategic corporate partners on more scalable green solutions. An example of that collaboration is, for instance, as Mads also alluded to, when we are doing carbon capture with Microsoft. That brings me to my final slide. Four key takeaways from me. First of all, we are a major green power producer in Europe.
We are the undisputed regional leader for offshore wind. We compete from a position of strength. Number two, we will deliver on our awarded capacity in with sufficient value creation. Number three, we are extremely well-positioned to get the most valuable GW in Europe due to our capability and the size of our pipeline. Finally, we are strategically committed to continue to work with our strategic corporate partners on meeting their decarbonization needs in Europe and also globally. Thank you very much for your time. With that, I will pass on to my dear colleague, David Hardy, who will now give you an update on where we are in U.S. Thank you.
Hello, everybody. My name is David Hardy. I lead our Ørsted's business in the Americas. I'm excited to be here today with all of you in London, and to tell you a little bit about the progress we've made in the Americas region and the prospects that we have ahead of us. First, maybe a short introduction on myself. I've been with Ørsted since early 2020, and throughout that period, I've primarily led our offshore business in the Americas until the reorganization last November, where my scope was expanded to include all of Ørsted's activities in the Americas. Prior to Ørsted, I spent approximately 10 years in senior executive roles with wind turbine OEM, Senvion and Vestas, in both the U.S. and internationally. I lived in Germany for three years, and prior to that, I spent 20 years with primarily GE and the U.S. Navy.
I'd like to tell you about Ørsted Americas. Since joining the U.S. market in 2015, Ørsted has made significant progress in its footprint and prominence in the market. We're the only pure-play developer in the U.S. to have an installed base of onshore wind, onshore solar, energy storage, and offshore wind. We're one of the largest deployers of capital, and we're a sought-after thought leader on the clean energy transition. You can see from the chart behind me that we have a impressive installed base and a large portfolio of projects under construction and in development.
Now, I'd like to just take a couple minutes and talk about some of the progress that we've made since the last Capital Markets Day. The first item on the list that I'm most excited about is that we're actually building, as we speak, America's first commercial scale offshore wind farm, the South Fork Wind Farm, a 132 MW project off the coast of Long Island, New York. We actually expect to put our first foundations in the water within the next phase. Super exciting. We've also matured our three near-term awarded portfolio projects. Talk about those more later, but we've matured them through the development cycle, we're approaching FID and have primarily cleared all the boundary conditions needed to take FID. We've also been awarded 2 GW, two new projects in our offshore portfolio.
On the onshore side, we've added 2 GW of operating assets, and we have 1.6 GW under construction. We've signed 24 corporate PPAs, and we're now entered in five U.S. power markets. We also last year announced the first farm-down of our onshore portfolio, where we were able to retain 100% NPV on the farm-down assets. This was a DKK 2 billion transaction, or $410 million transaction, and it's important for two reasons: one, it demonstrates the value that we're able to create on our onshore business in the Americas, and two, it demonstrates that we can take our farm-down model into the U.S., even with the complex capital structure, with tax equity. Last, we built a regional platform for growth going forward.
When I joined Ørsted in early 2020, we were approximately 150 people across both parts of our business. Today, we're over 700 people in the Americas. We're building a team to take us into the future. Now, I'd like to talk about the important market-shaping legislation that occurred in the U.S. last year. Of course, this is the IRA, and I know many of you know a lot about the IRA already, but I just want to share a few specific examples of what it means to Ørsted. This is the largest investment in green energy in America. The expanded and the extension of the current tax credits will lead to significant growth for onshore and offshore renewables, and the new tax credits for energy storage and P2X will expand these benefits even further.
You've seen charts like the one we have on the right-hand side. This is a chart from Bloomberg New Energy Finance that talk about the growth, but maybe you don't appreciate the longevity that the IRA creates for the U.S. market. For the first time, we have a 10-year runway of opportunity for us to really, as an industry, think strategically and build the long-term supply chains we need to have a more fruitful energy transition, long-term energy transition, as well as build a more stable renewables energy environment. If you've worked in renewables in the U.S., like I have for the last few years, it's been quite cyclical, and now hopefully, we've got a little bit of stability in policy. Last comment I'll comment on, is that Ørsted isn't just a beneficiary of the IRA. We actually helped shape the IRA.
We gave tangible input to policymakers about how best to reduce the carbon emissions in the U.S., and how to create the environment for business that would lead to long-term success of the industry. Today, we're still shaping the implementation of the IRA, as all the tax guidance hasn't actually been released from the U.S. Treasury. Two important points of the IRA that I wanna highlight, the energy communities benefit and the local content, domestic content benefits.
We see these as really influential additions to our market here in the U.S., and they'll really make a difference to the long-term offshore wind and onshore industry, but can actually help us in the short term as well, and can play a significant impact to improving our awarded portfolio and offshore, especially given the market-leading investments we've made in the domestic supply chain in the U.S. in the last five years. Now, I'd like to go on and talk about our priorities for the region. We have four key priorities for our region. The first is that we're very focused on maximizing value on our existing offshore wind portfolio. I probably spend 80% of my time on that. We'll come back to that later and talk about it.
We're also keen about the future of offshore wind in the U.S., and we're bullish, we're long on the opportunities that we see there. We need to be shaping our market-leading position and make sure that we're prepared for that next market phase. We see the benefits of the IRA, and we're growing our onshore business to take advantage of those and to build the next generation of customer solutions, integrated solutions like Rasmus just spoke about. Last, I think it's important for us to shape the market for the long term and ensure a stable marketplace for Ørsted in the Americas. I'll come back and talk about all four of these as I go through the rest of my presentation.
First, as I said, offshore wind is very important to us. We're targeting to achieve 3 GW- 5 GW of installed base by 2030. As we think about our existing and future portfolio for offshore wind, we're making strategic decisions. The first strategic decision that I'd like to share with you today, is the decision that we've made to focus solely on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast markets of the East Coast. We see this as the best markets in the U.S. for the following reasons: Those states need offshore wind in order to meet their decarbonization goals. Those states have high capacity targets today, and we expect those capacity targets to grow. The leases in those areas have good environmental attributes, wind speed, water depth, access to shore. We think that's important.
Last, we believe that we can build a synergistic hub for offshore wind, taking advantage of our stakeholder relations that we've built, the supply chain that we're building, and of course, the operation and maintenance phase of the projects as we build this hub out. Next, I'd like to talk about our existing awarded portfolio. Before I talk about the projects, I want to just spend a minute and make sure that you understand how strong our existing portfolio is vis-à-vis other portfolios in the U.S. Our existing portfolio comes with some fundamental advantages to others. This is anchored in the fact that we were early to buy our leases. We have some of the best leases in the market, and we paid very low prices for those original leases. We start from a position of strength just from the leases that we have.
Additionally, we've got some of the best offtake agreements. If you compare the portfolio of offtakes that we have across the states, it's very strong versus our competitors. Last, as you'll hear from my colleagues, Richard and Virginie, we're leveraged our EPC organization to really take advantage of our global scale and our supplier relationships to make early commitments to turbines and vessels before the latest cost increases. A large portion of our existing portfolio's capital commitments CapEx we secured early in time through frame agreements and other, and other advantages that we have. Now I'll talk about our awarded portfolio. The first three projects on the top of the list, we call our near-term awarded portfolio. I'm gonna come back to those. I have a whole separate slide on those. We're gonna spend a few minutes on those.
Next, we have Skipjack Wind, which is our Maryland project. While the official COD date of Skipjack Wind is 2026, there's a probability that this project could be delayed due to queue reforms in PJM, which is the transmission system that the project connects into. If this project is delayed, we'll use this time to improve the project. Today, this project is from a life cycle IRR or NPV, it is positive, but it's not exactly where we want it to be or in our targeted range. This is an active project that we're still developing, and like I said, we'll use this extra time from a project delay to continue to improve the project and get it into our guided range. Next, we have Ocean Wind 2. You heard Mads talk about Ocean Wind 2 earlier.
This is a project that in order for us to ensure that we get value creation, we've decided to reconfigure, and we're in active discussions with the state of New Jersey about what that means. It could mean project delays, different technology, or other value-adding activities. I'm going to talk about our near term awarded portfolio. I'm going to spend a few minutes on this slide, so bear with me. The takeaway of this slide is that we have confidence that we can create value in a forward-looking basis for the near term awarded portfolio. Let me tell you what we mean by that. First, it's important that I explain our current view of these projects.
The current view of these three projects is that they are NPV positive from a NPV neutral, I would say, or slightly positive to from a life cycle analysis calculation. Let me explain exactly what that means. First off, we're using our fully loaded, unlevered WACC framework, which is market dependent and technology dependent. This WACC framework has been very heavily affected by the 250 basis point risk-free rate of the 10-year Treasury note in the U.S. The WACC is much higher than at the time when these projects were awarded. That's the first assumption that you have to understand. The second is that we've, through our EPC organization, have basically got commitments, secured the CapEx for almost all of the scopes for these three projects.
Although those scopes are secured, that doesn't mean that we're not done working with our suppliers to try to continue to reduce cost, re-engineer, optimize, et cetera. We're still working on that, but we've got a kind of a ceiling on the cost side. We're also making an assumption of a 40% ITC for all three projects. Now, with the latest guidance from Treasury, not all the projects actually meet the requirements for 40% ITC. We believe that through our strong relationships with the federal government and the dialogues that we're having, that by the time the final guidance comes out, all three of these projects will qualify for either the energy community or the domestic content, additional 10% bonus ITC, or maybe both. Last, embedded in our calculation are some additional changes to the ORECs.
As Mads alluded to earlier, just yesterday, we filed a petition with the State of New York, the Public Service Commission, who's the regulator. We asked them to retroactively apply some attributes of the New York three RFP back retroactively to South Fork. These include inflation adjustment calculations and grid upgrade cost sharing. We don't know the outcome of that, but we have high confidence that the state will support us. Last, or in addition, we've been in discussions with New Jersey about making sure that we can get the full pass back of the IRA tax credits to Ocean Wind One. It's all of these assumptions that go into our life, 100%, neutral life cycle IRR for these projects. You might ask the question: If these projects are life cycle neutral, why would you keep investing, David?
I have three answers for you. The first is that we've made some significant investments already, and when we look at the forward IRR, when we look at the basis, using that as a, as a basis for our calculation and decision making, the next kroner dollars that we put in to the projects will be value creating. There's a lot of capital still to be deployed on these three projects. We see that as an important metric and a, and a way for us to think about these projects. Secondly, it is, in fact, actually the fact that we're investing in these projects and continue to invest in these projects, the states and federal government in the U.S. want these projects to be successful. They need these projects for their carbon, decarbonization goals.
It is our continued investment that is leading to them working with us to retool the offtake agreements and open up new tax opportunities, tax credit opportunities for us. It's a little bit of a virtuous cycle. Last, I would say that there's a strategic benefit for us to build these projects, and I'll come back to that in a little bit more detail. Before I go on to the next slide and talk about the strategic value of building these projects, I want to just reemphasize one really important point that Mads made and that Daniel will make, and that is that our standard going forward is still our fully loaded 100% life cycle.
Sorry, fully loaded life cycle, WACC framework with 150 to 300 basis points spread to WACC target. For projects like Skipjack and Ocean Wind 2 and our new bids in Rhode Island and New York, that will be our standard. We just see the opportunity with these three projects, for the reasons I just stated, to use this forward-looking IRR as our benchmark. That won't be a precedent going forward. Now talking about the strategic value of building these projects. I see six things that will be a benefit to Ørsted going forward if we build these projects. First is, of course, that we have our big pipeline of opportunity, where we can bid from in the future.
If we build these projects, we'll also get some unique learnings from building the first projects and operating the first projects in the U.S.. Installing turbines in U.S. waters, building the first HVDC system, working with stakeholders, et cetera. The work that we're doing builds our reputation and our credibility, and that's really important in our industry right now. We also keep our commitments to local communities, to build for supply chains, and as a first mover with labor. Finally, we're making investments in infrastructure, ports, and in supply chains, and by building these projects and completing those investments, those will give us a competitive advantage going forward with access to these infrastructure and capacity slots of local content, which is important for future domestic content requirements for additional tax credits in the U.S..
Why is all this strategic investment important? It's because we believe in the long-term benefits and the long-term opportunity in offshore wind in the U.S. Why are we bullish on offshore wind in the long term in the U.S.? It's because the market's improving there. Like I said, the states and federal government want to see the success. The federal government's funding resources for permitting. The IRA will make projects, will add value to projects going forward. On the state side, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, they've all changed their next phase of RFPs to include inflation adjustment and other cost-sharing mechanisms to de-risk those projects for us. We see the market as something that's improving and maturing, and a place where we want to be in the future.
That leads us to our recent announcement of the acquisition of Eversource's half of our so-called Lease Area 500. This is a lease that we've known for a long time. It's a great lease. It has, again, good access to shore, nice shallow depth, and some of the strongest wind and lowest wake in the U.S. It's a very competitive lease, and we think that we also got a very good deal compared to other prices paid for leases recently. It will allow us to build up to 4 GW in this new, improving market, but we've already bid 2.3 GW into New York and Rhode Island.
Now, as the sole owner of this lease, we can be strategic about if we bring in a development partner on these, if we win these bids, or if we wait and farm-down these after we've de-risked them. Like I said, these two bids, Rhode Island and New York, of course, we're gonna stick to our targeted returns of 150 MW-300 MW, life cycle, fully loaded, WACC framework. We're confident that not only these projects, but all the future projects will be able to hit our targets in the U.S.. I'd now like to shift to our onshore business. It's a very important part of our business in the U.S. and for Ørsted overall. We're on track to deliver 13.5 GW of onshore capacity by 2030.
In addition to the 5.6 GW of projects, 5.7 GW of projects that are in operation or under construction, we have a large pipeline, 8.6 GW of substantiated pipeline and 16.4 GW of opportunity pipeline. This is a combination of onshore wind and onshore solar and storage. This year, in 2023, we'll continue to expand our substantiated and opportunity pipeline as we move into our core markets, so those pipelines will grow this year. In addition to our greenfield pipeline, which I'm describing here, our commercial team is out in the marketplace, scouring the market for good opportunities through M&A to augment our greenfield so that we can create the best value for Ørsted and onshore. I'm confident that we'll continue to create value.
Continue our track record of success in the onshore business in the U.S., that this will be an important part of our business going forward. In order to show the value of onshore, I want to just take a minute and give you two case studies on things that we've done in the U.S. on the onshore side. Before I do, I want to highlight the strong success that we've had since our acquisition in 2018 of Lincoln Clean Energy. We've added 3.3 GW of onshore assets in operation, and more on the way, obviously, with the construction pipeline we have. Our returns are tracking above the initial expectations of the pro forma of the transaction.
This has been a very great success for Ørsted, and I'm very proud of the Americas onshore team for the progress that they've made. Now on to the two case studies. The first is a project called Sunflower Wind. It's a late-stage construction project in Kansas, onshore wind, 214 MW. This was a project that we bought as part of a acquisition portfolio, and at the time, both we and the seller attributed very low value to this project. After we bought it, we reconfigured the project, we leveraged our supply chain relationships and our origination capabilities, and we were able to create a project that's well within our value creation framework. This project will be COD'd just later this year. Great success for a project that we paid almost nothing for. Similarly, but different, Eleven Mile.
Eleven Mile is a 300 MW solar project with 300 MW four-hour battery system, combined technology system. This is for our utility customer, SRP, in Arizona. The utility was trying to permit a gas-fired power plant. Their permits they weren't able to get their permits through, they were scrambling to try to make up this capacity for their demand growth. They came to Ørsted, we were one of the only companies at the time that could complete the project, this complex project, in the short timeline that they wanted to have the project online by summer of 2024.
Due to some of our supply chain relationships, and we were able to quickly make a deal with them, make a deal with our suppliers, use our engineering and procurement resources to bring this project to fruition. This is an example of us fulfilling a customer need in these integrated solutions. This is the third-largest battery in America, so this isn't a small storage project. I think these two case studies show the capabilities that Ørsted is building in the onshore business, and again, I believe that this will be an important part of our equity story going forward. I'd just like to talk quickly about a few capabilities that we're building in the region. After the integration last November, we, of course, saw synergies across our business as we expected, but two things have really come forward.
One is our ability to leverage the combined technologies to build these complex, next-generation, multi-technology solutions. We see this as an emerging trend and something that our customers are asking for, and that as one business in the region, we can really take advantage of. Second, of course, as one integrated business, we can talk with one strong voice to customers, suppliers, and probably most important, stakeholders. You've heard me talk about, throughout the presentation, how strong we are in our stakeholder management in the U.S., and I think we're the best, actually, at that in the U.S. It's important for Ørsted overall, and you heard Rasmus talk about the work that they've done in Europe, and of course, you know, we're gonna do that in Asia and everywhere. In the U.S., in...
In the nascent industries of offshore wind, standalone storage, and P2X, it's even more important that we shape the industry, we'll continue to do that. I'm confident that we can win bids, shape the industry, and actually achieve the results that we want if we're strong in our stakeholder management. I'll just conclude with a few key highlights and reemphasize some of the things I already said. First, as one of the largest deployers of capital in the U.S., we're very well positioned to take advantage of this exciting market. Second, we're very focused on creating value on our existing offshore portfolio and preparing for the next generation of offshore wind in the U.S.. Last, we see the benefits of the IRA. We'll continue to grow our onshore business, leverage our customer relationships, and solve our customers' energy transition needs. Thank you very much.
I'll now turn it over to Per via video to talk about our APAC region.
The Asia-Pacific region, it accounts for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions and is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. It's also home to many countries with excellent potential for offshore wind, with good wind speeds, skilled workforces, and industrial capabilities. We are seeing governments set ambitious green goals, with over a third of all RE100 companies based in this region, we know there is high corporate demand for clean power. Towards 2030, more than 30 GW offshore wind could be installed in Asia-Pacific, this could double to over 60 GW by 2035. I'm confident about the long-term green transition in the APAC region. Let's take a look at the leading role Ørsted is already playing here.
With almost 2 GW offshore wind capacity in operation or under construction, we are the leading developer in Asia Pacific and have the most mature pipeline. We are present in the markets in Asia Pacific with the highest potential for offshore wind projects, and we are also positioning ourselves through our engineering and sourcing hubs. Taiwan is the home of our APAC headquarters and the regional front runner for offshore wind. Across Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, we have a multi-gigawatt project pipeline. We have paused our market development activities in Vietnam, but still see this as an important supplier market. Earlier this year, we submitted a feasibility license application for Australia's first offshore wind zone off the coast of Victoria. We have struck a careful balance between building a local presence and retaining a cost-efficient setup in our markets.
While we do see longer term potential for onshore wind and solar, our current focus is offshore wind in Asia Pacific. In Taiwan, we are due to commission the final turbines for the 900 MW Greater Changhua 1 and 2A offshore wind farms this year. This past March, we announced the board's final investment decision to build our second batch of utility-scale projects, the 920 MW Greater Changhua 2B and 4 offshore wind farms. We take our responsibility to prioritize value creation seriously. For example, we did not bid in the previous round in Taiwan. We took stock of the limitations set by the regulation, including project size and content restrictions, and concluded that we could not make the projects investable at that point.
I feel positive that improvements to the framework in Taiwan this year will ensure further successful build-outs of offshore wind. Ultimately, there are fundamental reasons why Greater Changhua 2B and 4 is viable. This is a large-scale project with full flexibility on local content requirements and long-term stable revenue based on an offtake agreement. Working in partnership has been at the heart of making it happen. We have utilized Ørsted's network of regional and global supply chain relationships to optimize our CAPEX. Most significantly, we secured the world's largest corporate power purchase agreement of its kind with TSMC, Taiwan's semiconductor giant. TSMC will offtake the full production of our 920 MW wind farm for a fixed price, 20-year term. For Ørsted, this landmark agreement confirmed our belief that CPPAs, alongside supportive regulatory frameworks, are a key part of the future success for renewable energy.
We have started project construction and will be ready to deliver clean energy for our partner, TSMC, on time. Looking ahead, we will apply the learnings from our projects in Taiwan and around the world to our multi-gigawatt APAC pipeline. We are building a strong reputation as a reliable green energy partner to governments and corporates to catalyze Asia's green transition.
All right, this concludes the first part of the presentation. We will now take a short break and be back here in approximately 17, 18 minutes at 12 o'clock. Thank you, everyone.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for coming back so promptly from your coffee break. My name is Olivia Breese, and I'm the CEO of our Power-to-X business. I've been with Ørsted since 2012 in a variety of commercial leadership roles across strategic joint ventures and M&A, market development, and commercial innovation, all highly relevant areas for this very new element of Ørsted's portfolio. I'm looking forward to taking you through how we at Ørsted see the emerging Power-to-X market, how and where we will create value, and then looking in a little bit more detail at our development, portfolio, and pipeline, and in particular at FlagshipONE, the e-methanol project we took a final investment decision on in December of last year. First of all, why is Power-to-X important?
Well, if you believe in a world that runs entirely on green energy, you, of course, want to decarbonize as much as you can with green electrons. You cannot get to net zero only with electrons, because approximately 30% of global emissions come from the hard-to-abate or hard-to-electrify sectors, such as heavy transport, heavy industry, and chemicals, and these sectors need different solutions. For these sectors, we have Power-to-X, and Power-to-X is the umbrella term for taking renewable electricity, and the cost of renewable electricity constitutes approximately 50% of the outturn cost of green hydrogen. You take your renewable electricity, you either turn it into green hydrogen through electrolysis, or you further synthesize that green hydrogen and you create e-ammonia, or you add biogenic carbon, and you create e-methanol or ultimately e-kerosene. Both hydrogen and ammonia are already significant energy carriers across the world.
Indeed, let's get my years right. Indeed, in 2021, there were already 91 million tons of hydrogen being used, but all of that hydrogen, pretty much, was fossil-based hydrogen. With not only that very, very strong existing demand, but also the additional demand, which comes from these new verticals, you can see that the demand growth for renewable hydrogen and its derivatives is only continuing to grow until 2050. As Matt said, we've shown you charts like this before, except the difference between this chart and the chart that we showed you in 2021 is the number on the far right, that's continued to grow. The thing that hasn't changed is the number on the far left.
Over the last two years, we've not seen significant, tangible movement in terms of actual production of hydrogen and e-fuels. There have been a couple of notable FIDs, obviously, including us, but there has not been the fundamental shift towards tangible action that everybody was expecting in 2021. We are confident that 2023 will be the year when we start to see that tangible action, and there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that there are very strong now, renewable, sorry, regulatory commitments, both coming out of the U.S. with the IRA and in Europe with the European Hydrogen Bank, where we are seeing actual money being put in support of the production of green hydrogen.
In Europe, we are seeing demand being incentivized, mandated to decarbonize, not only through EU ETS and the RED III directives, but also through refuel aviation and maritime. In addition, we are seeing forward-leaning demand sectors, so private actors taking tangible steps now to decarbonize. You've heard my colleague, Ingrid, talk about Dillinger's approach to decarbonizing green steel using green hydrogen. Our partner, Maersk, is similarly taking a very forward-leaning approach to decarbonizing their shipping operations. They've ordered 19 dual fuel vessels that run both on e-methanol, but also on conventional bunker fuel, and that's only a small proportion of the total number of more than 100 ships, which have been ordered across the industry to be delivered before 2028.
With those clear market signals and the demand, you can see why we consider that Power-to-X has the ability to create significant value to Ørsted, and it will really do that in two ways. The first is through absolute standalone value. With the demand opportunity that I showed on the previous slide, you can see that we will be able, through our Power-to-X business, to access new and growing demand verticals. That, in and of itself, is a very significant opportunity. But it also allows us to expand our decarbonization offering to our strategic corporate partners. You've heard both David and Rasmus talk about our conviction that the future of offtake will not be government-led, it will be private actor-led, and that is even more true for Power-to-X than it is for renewable electricity.
Our ability, through our Power-to-X business, to meet the needs of our strategic corporate partners, not only through electrons, but also with molecules, that for us is critical. It also allows us to maximize the value of our assets on an end-to-end basis. For our renewables assets, that means that we can direct the renewable electron to the most value-creating end use, whether that is the grid or its Power-to-X, depending on demand and price signals. It also offers us, it also offers us an opportunity to use the captured carbon from our bio plants in Denmark, to use that captured biogenic carbon to produce either e-methanol or e-kerosene.
Finally, Power-to-X enables large-scale renewables build-up, both as a significant source of demand for renewables, but also as an alternative route to market for very large-scale renewables, where perhaps the grid is insufficient to allow those electrons to go to market or to transport them to market in their current form. It is this value creation that underpins our ambition for Power-to-X. Our ambition for this new business, my ambition for this new business, is to catalyze the decarbonization of hard-to-electrify sectors, and to do this by leveraging Ørsted's pioneering DNA to grow a scalable Power-to-X platform in Europe and North America by 2030. That's a very dense ambition statement, so I'm just gonna unpick it for you a little bit. I think perhaps the most important word on the slide, actually, is scalable.
You've seen from my slides, you've heard from Mads, this is a sector in its infancy. It hardly exists today. Our ambition for this decade is to be ready, is to be ready to meet the demand which we expect at large scale towards the end of this decade and into the 2030s. We're confident that we will be able to do this, that we'll be able to scale ourselves, that the industry will scale to meet us, and that we'll be able to do that in line with our target returns. The thing that gives us the most confidence in that is that even today, even in this very early phase of the market, our under-construction portfolio across Power-to-X and carbon capture, that is within our existing spread to WACC requirements.
The other two important points on this slide, the first is the point about the hard-to-electrify sectors. We are deliberately looking to electrify as much as we can, because we believe that that is the most efficient way to reach a world that runs entirely on green energy, but also because you, because that way, you use hydrogen, and ultimately, e-fuels, only where it is essential, only where it is most value-creating. Our target offtake will be steel, it will be chemicals, it will be shipping for the rest of this decade. Europe and North America, we look very much to Europe and to North America for this decade, because that is where we have the existing portfolio of electrons, that is where we have a very, very strong production fundamentals, and also, importantly, very strong demand.
We believe in our ability to be able to install approximately 2 GW of electrolyzer capacity across Northern Europe and North America by 2030, and also within those markets, to continue to develop a pipeline of approximately 4 GW. How are we going to do this? Well, we have the right experience and capabilities within Ørsted today to scale Power-to-X. First of all, as you've heard extensively this morning, we are a leader in optimizing power generation. Now, why does that matter for me? Why does that matter for Power-to-X? Well, because as I said at the beginning, the cost of power is 50% of the outturn cost of green hydrogen. It's about 35% of the outturn cost of e-fuels.
Large scale, low cost, high availability, low-risk power, that is critical to any Power-to-X business that is looking to deliver at scale, and I know that I can rely on my colleagues to deliver me that. The second thing is that the electrolyzer market itself is in its infancy, and we are very, very accustomed to scaling technology. When we first installed a turbine, it was 0.5 MW. Now, we install 14 MW turbines. We know how to optimize the supply chain as it scales up. We know how to work with it, and we know that we have found value in doing this before and doing it successfully. Thirdly, we're building capabilities in adjacent technologies. Mads has already mentioned our success in the Danish carbon capture and storage tender with Microsoft as our carbon credits offtaker.
The capabilities we will build in delivering on our obligations in that tender, they will be critical if we are to deliver both e-methanol and ultimately e-kerosene at scale. The Power-to-X value chain is a long one. I'll come on in a minute to talk about how we see ourselves playing in that value chain. Critically, to do so successfully, we will need partnerships. We'll need equity partnerships, we'll need offtake partnerships, we'll need supply chain partnerships. Our global ability not only to execute on partnerships, on joint ventures, but actually, as Rasmus said, to really live in them, to really make sure that they create value for ourselves and for our partners over the lifetime of an asset. That is a really important capability for us in this business.
The other critical thing is our ability to sell the molecules that we produce. Now, we've executed more than 55 corporate PPAs globally, and that gives me the confidence that we will be able to deliver similar value creation through the sale of molecules. Finally, but perhaps the most important, we have an experienced team, and that experienced team has deep technical capabilities. We have more than 100 people within the Power-to-X business and within the wider Ørsted, who are delivering on our pipeline of projects, who have profound expertise in project development and origination, in process engineering, critically, in process safety. We're not going to be developing our Power-to-X projects in the same way as we develop our offshore wind projects.
We're not going to be building the deep technical expertise at every single stage of the value chain that we have done for offshore wind. Given the length and complexity of the Power-to-X value chain, we are going to focus our capabilities both on those areas where we're already very strong, obviously, renewables, also on offtake, and we're going to build the capabilities where we believe that having in-house abilities will either allow us to create asymmetric value, to really reduce risk, or alternatively, to have access to critical control points. That's the electrolysis, it's the capture and usage of biogenic CO2, and it's operations. For the rest, we expect to continue to work very closely with the supply chain, or we expect to partner. We expect to partner potentially along the value chain, partnering for both the capabilities and also for capital.
We're going to be doing this, as I said, across Europe and North America, and our development approach is very deliberately to focus our development on specific hubs. In Denmark and in the Netherlands, we are developing, in each case, an up to a gigawatt hub of green hydrogen. In Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden, we will be developing an e-methanol business, and in the U.S., particularly in ERCOT, we will be delivering e-methanol, and towards the end of the decade, also e-ammonia. The choices of these markets reflect not only the strong production fundamentals, but also the existing demand that we see in these markets, and also our market-leading platform of corporate relationships that we are able to leverage here. To put that into a little bit of context, this is what we're doing in Denmark.
Denmark is, as I said, one of the markets where we're developing a hydrogen hub, and that starts with our H2RES project at Avedøre, only 2 MW, but we expect this year to take in a final investment decision on a 10 MW hydrogen project, also at Avedøre, and then relatively rapidly to scale that towards the end of the decade, so that in 2030 or a little bit beyond, we're talking about a 1 GW of project in Denmark, producing whatever the right molecule is at that stage in the market. That is not something that is possible to know today, but we will be able to produce hydrogen, methanol, kerosene, as the market requires then. Finally, I'd like to turn to FlagshipONE. FlagshipONE is the e-methanol project we took a final investment decision on in December of last year.
As Matt said, it's one of the largest methanol projects in Europe, even though the electrolyzer is only 70 MW. It's going to produce approximately 50,000 tons of e-methanol a year, and to put that in context, that is equivalent to decarbonizing one ocean-going large container ship for an entire year. It's a good example of how we're going to exist with our suppliers. We are acting as the end-to-end integrated developer, and we're looking very much to experienced suppliers, Siemens, Topsoe, Carbon Clean, to deliver their critical components. It speaks also to the already existing value creation potential within Power-to-X, that this is a project where we have seen the offtake prices in the discussions that we're having with offtakers, increase by approximately 35% since we started having those dialogues in 2022. Finally, it's a critical stepping stone for future projects.
The ability to actually have steel in the ground, to learn from that steel in the ground, is already delivering very rapid learning loops, which we're benefiting from across the portfolio. Before I hand over to my colleagues, Richard and Virginie, I'd like to conclude by saying we are confident that we will be a market shaper and a significant player in Europe and in the U.S. with this ambition by 2030. That is because of our ambition, married with tangible action. It's because of the value creation we already see today in our portfolio, and which we believe we will be able to carry forwards towards 2030. It is because of the existing capabilities within Ørsted as a whole, that we have and that we are building and which we believe we can continue to leverage as we scale.
Richard, thank you very much.
Hello, and good morning. I'm Richard Hunter. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Ørsted. You could say that I'm responsible for the delivery engine of the company. I'm gonna talk today about EPCO, and I'll be accompanied by our Chief Procurement Officer, Virginie Van de Cotte. A little bit about me: I have over 30 years experience in large, complicated infrastructure and businesses based upon strong engineering and project delivery competencies. Sorry. What I want to do is, we will talk about EPCO, and we'll do that largely in the context of offshore wind. First of all, let's talk about where we've come to date. We are the world's leading offshore constructor and operator. As Rasmus has already highlighted, we delivered the world's first offshore wind farm some 30 years ago.
Whether you look at the number of farms constructed, the capacity installed or indeed the number of farms in operation, we are the number one, with some distance to the number two. If we look at most developers, they only have a fraction of the experience that we have. Many don't have any experience at all at this point in time. Now, just to move on to what the EPCO acronym stands for. We're going to talk today about four areas of the business, so our engineering and design capabilities, our procurement and supply chain, our construction, delivery, and execution capabilities, and of course, how we add value through the operational lifetime of the assets.
We have experience across all of these areas. It's based upon a very strong talent pool that we've built up over time, that covers each of the four areas, and is also driven by a very strong digital capability that is delivering tools and analytics to our overall business. What is the context that we're doing this in going forward? We are seeing increased complexity in wind farms and within the energy system as a whole. As part of that, they're also being incorporated into much more complex energy systems as we go forward. Early wind farms were relatively simple: a few turbines, a single connection to onshore, relatively limited use cases and operational complexity. Now, these are very large. They've incorporated significant offshore assets, many connections to the onshore. Indeed, they're of a scale to be strategically relevant at a national level.
We're also combining those now with other elements of the energy system. Whether it's storage solutions, offshore offtake, or elements of P2X, as Olivia's highlighted, these are continuing to add to the complexity and the use cases that apply to our projects. We have the deep competencies around the component level, the package level, but that's not enough. You have to be able to integrate this within the wider energy system, and ensure that you're delivering the overall performance of a wind farm in that energy system. In doing that, if you don't have those competencies, any developer that thinks that they can procure some turbines, a transmission system, some vessels, and just put them together, will have a great deal of difficulty commissioning into service a compliant, operationally compliant wind farm. We in Ørsted have those capabilities.
We have the experience to be able to do that and to deliver across the piece. Let's just dive a little bit into those. Firstly, our engineering and design competencies. We continue to add value project by project in what we're doing, and continuously improve. We have some examples here. In terms of ground risk assessment, on our Hornsea 3 project, we have achieved something of the order of 50% savings versus previous projects in our geotechnical analysis. If we look at foundations on our Hornsea 2 wind farm, on a like-to-like basis, compared to Hornsea 1, we've saved around 15% of the foundation steel. With our transmission systems and capacity, we've continuously evolved project by project to increase the output that we can achieve.
Just looking at one of our recent development projects, by the latest thermal analysis and cable design technology, we've been able to remove the risk of curtailment due to temperature in operation. That means an increase in the maximum capacity output of the wind farm of more than 10%. We continue to lead the market in terms of our offshore wind farm modeling and performance. We're now achieving supreme accuracy in our predictions of yield across wind farms, Our models are entirely based on long-range wake effects that are really quite significant now in what we're able to do. Those long-term, long-range wind effects, many of the other developers are only now waking up to the implications of. With that, we're going to move along and talk about supply chain, and I will hand over to Virginie.
Thank you, Richard. I wanted to say good morning. In fact, it's good afternoon. Let me first introduce myself. My name is Virginie Van de Cotte. I'm Chief Procurement Officer. Before joining Ørsted, I was working for Alstom and Bombardier, where I had global leadership positions in procurement, supply chain, and operations. By the way, I don't have a cold, I just have a voice that's easier to remember. I would like to share with you how we work, and also why we have a leading position in supply chain. We have a preferred, and we are a preferred partner for the supply chain because of our unique value proposition. Let me pause for a moment, and let us reflect on what is really happening in the supply chain in our industry.
You've all heard that there is a concern of an imbalance between supply and demand. We see many developers running to suppliers to try to secure capacity. On the supplier side, we see that there is a concern that some of the developers will not be able to take off the committed demand. As a result, key top suppliers are becoming very selective with whom they want to work. Ørsted is always amongst the preferred suppliers, and that is really because of our scale and the pipeline that we have. They also recognize the strong experience that we have to build successfully wind farms in line with our commitments. Especially appreciated by the suppliers is what Richard already have mentioned to you, it's our in-house capability.
In that way, we jointly collaborate with our suppliers on innovation, but also continuous improvement to create and get more value out of our solutions, while we're driving and committing on sustainability. You've heard Rasmus and David mentioning that we're going to need 17 GW from now up to 2030. The question is: How do we secure capacity? It is really a combination of project-specific contracts and long-term agreements. As a precursor in this industry, we've built strong relationships with our suppliers. In fact, we've grown together in this industry. Through those strategic alliances, we have put ourselves in a favorable position to secure capacity and lock prices for core products. Let me talk you through some of our core products. Turbines and foundations, we have secured more than 50% of our demand, equivalent to 10 GW.
We also monitor very closely what is happening on steel. We are in a unique position, as we have secured 400,000 ton yearly capacity of steel, which is above 80% of what we need up to 2030. We also see an increased demand on cables. For that reason, we've proactively locked in access of 4,000 kilometers of cables. Through the long-term agreements, we've also secured heavy lift vessels for about 10 GW. Again, about 50% of what we need. It is important to highlight that the long-term agreements do not only secure capacity, but also give us the contribution to price certainty. I'm really pleased with this breed of strategic alliances, that we and our team can give to our project team and development team, the certainty and the visibility that no other developers can match.
We do not only secure capacity through long-term agreements, we also continuously develop the supply chain to get more access to capacity and at competitive costs, of course. We have shown that we are front runners in developing critical supply chain in our industry. Again, through the unique technical capabilities that we have and the close collaboration to the suppliers. A notable example that I like to share is with Cadeler, where we have supporting them on their journey to become a really full transportation and installation vessel suppliers, and on our side, also securing more of that heavy lift vessel capacity. We also have track record of accelerating supply chain build-out in critical markets. I'd like to share an example in the U.S., where we have facilitated construction of a fully American-made vessel, wind installation vessel.
I've been talking a lot about long-term agreements, but it's also the long-term agreements and the visibility that we give to our suppliers that allows them to really take the investment to these decisions to expand production facility. Again, a nice example there is Seja, that by us giving them the demand, they have accelerated and taken the investment decision of a new state-of-the-art facility in, of foundations in the U.K.. It is really the supply chain alliances that we have, and that unique ability to continuously develop the supply chain, that gives us that flexibility to really secure the CapEx while we are developing the design of our projects.
On the left side of the slide, you have a representation of the CapEx of a wind farm, with the percentage represented, representing the major categories that we have. You can also see that per category, we have quite a broad scope of supply base. As we are further developing and designing the projects, we lock in our more detailed contracts, so that when we come into FID, we have secured almost all of our CapEx. There's a small portion, maybe a question that you will get, what do we do not secure? There, we have, of course, some provisions and contingencies that we also add. Our focus is not only securing capacity, but we also have a leadership role in catalyzing the sustainability in our industry.
In fact, in order to achieve the net zero 2024 greenhouse gas emission target, we cannot do it without our suppliers. Therefore, we also feel that we have the responsibility to help our suppliers to accelerate investments in green production. Again, we do that by giving them long-term visibility and also the necessary commitments, so that they can do the investment in sustainable production. From an emission perspective or environmental perspective, steel is the challenge, because it represents 50% of the wind farm lifecycle greenhouse gas emission. As my colleague, Ingrid, already shared in the video, I really would like to highlight again the agreement that Ørsted and Dillinger have signed, which is really a groundbreaking long-term agreement that enables Dillinger to accelerate investment in lower carbon production.
Again, as Ingrid mentioned, we will also develop together the first foundation for the offshore industry based on renewable energy or hydrogen and scrap steel. I'd really like to share that the moment of signing that agreement is a proud moment that I will never forget in my career, because it's a really strong contribution to the decarbonization of our industry. To conclude, I'd like to reemphasize that we use and we leverage our leadership position to secure capacity on competitive terms and to ensure that we can deliver on our projects. Thank you, and over to you, Richard.
Thank you, Virginie. Let's now talk about our construction projects and some of the challenges that we face when we're doing those, and how we overcome them. Now, we all know that COVID-19 posed unique challenges in so many ways. I'm gonna look here at the two major farms that we had under construction during that period. If we turn to Hornsea 2, and Mads has already mentioned it, we faced very significant lockdowns and spikes during our main installation season and throughout the commissioning period. In addition, the in-time delivery from our worldwide supply chain to this had many logistical challenges due to COVID. Despite all of that, we were able to commission with only two months' delay. Turning to Greater Changhua 1 and 2A, again, COVID had even more extreme impacts here, with more than one year of effective lockdown of installation.
We were not, at times, able to bring workforce into Taiwan, and even when you could, there was very extensive quarantine periods, and we had difficulties exchanging crews on vessels. Despite all of that, we have 97 turbines installed, which is more than any of the comparators. Yes, with one-year delay, that's still only about half what other developers have seen. Let's put those unique challenges also into the context of our overall portfolio. We have an unparalleled track record of delivering projects on time and to budget. Even with Hornsea 2 and Changhua 1 and 2, these projects are still adding value to our business. Looking forward, the current market constraints and the extreme period we've seen in the last 12 months has had some impact in our ongoing projects.
By contracting early and by partnering with the supply chain, as Virginie has set out, we've been able to mitigate and manage the significant proportion of that. Moving from construction, we obviously go into operation. We get the maximum output from any given wind farm. Looking here, you can see that we continue to increase the share that we are self-operating within the industry, and that is continuing to deliver significant value to the wider business. Here you can see in terms of availability, which clearly higher availability results in more output and revenue, and in terms of the cost of our operational activities. We're driving this using our significant modeling capabilities, our advanced analytics, which are continuously evolving, and we're able to harness innovation and synergies across our portfolio to continue to drive value in our ongoing operational activities.
Let's look in a little more detail at that. As turbine sizes have continued to increase, as the industry matures, and as we've built our operational experience, we're seeing continuous optimization of operating costs. Looking at the latest 11 MW generation of turbines, we don't expect to use any more hours to service these than we do for the 6 MW generation. We've increased automation and digital activities, utilizing drones and robots, to do a significant proportion of our inspections. Not only is this driving efficiency, it means we have far fewer manual activities within confined and challenged spaces within a turbine.
Of course, with that world-leading installed base of wind farms in operation, coupled with the hub structure that we use around our core markets, we're able to realize significant synergies across the operating portfolio in things like logistics, warehouses, et cetera, all continuing to drive the market leadership in terms of both the operational cost and, as we referred to earlier, the actual performance of the wind farm. In summary, we have the unrivaled experience and capabilities to execute the energy systems of the future, the engineering competencies, the supply relationships and procurement methodologies, the best-in-class delivery of projects, and of course, that unique operational experience across a very wide installed base.
We're able to combine that with a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to commission a wind farm into operation against all of the technical and market requirements that exist, all while continuing to incorporate sustainability. We are best placed to deliver these assets into service on time and to budget. With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention. We will now go to a short video hosted by our Head of Strategy and Innovation, Varun.
At Ørsted, we believe leading on innovation is key to leading the world toward a future powered entirely by green energy. Innovation gives us an edge in our core offshore wind business, and we're also investing in breakthroughs to integrate even higher penetrations of renewables into the global energy system and decarbonize the world economy. At any given moment, Ørsted scientists and engineers are incubating more than 100 R&D projects that strengthen our competitive advantage. For example, we've designed, built, and patented the industry's first unmanned survey vessel, which uses onboard LIDAR to accurately predict offshore wind generation at prospective sites. Right now, it's 210 km off the Danish coast in the North Sea. It's withstood storm waves of over nine meters and can spend a year out at sea, remotely operated from shore.
In each of the next five months, we'll build a new vessel. The new vessels will survey waters over 300 meters deep to scope out the best sites for floating offshore wind, a key innovation priority for Ørsted. Beyond in-house R&D, we're actively building partnerships and investing in the thriving global clean tech ecosystem, spanning cutting-edge university research to innovative startups. Take our PICASO project with University of Oxford. We've long been the industry leader at designing the most efficient monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines, using less steel while ensuring reliable operation. For two decades, we've managed to do more with less, while our turbines have grown larger and more powerful. If not for our design breakthroughs, our foundations would be 500 tons heavier and have to embed five meters deeper into the seabed. Now, we've partnered with leading University of Oxford researchers to prolong this trend.
We've developed an unprecedented understanding of the cyclic stresses foundations face across different soils, so we can use cost-effective monopiles even as turbines grow and water depths increase. Outside of academia, we've invested in dozens of disruptive startup technology companies. For example, take one of our portfolio companies, Spoor, which powers data collection on bird flights near offshore wind farms. We've deployed Spoor at two sites, harnessing sensors and AI to accurately track birds, and in the process, demonstrating that the risks of collision are already low. Like Spoor, innovative startups around the world look to bring on Ørsted as a strategic partner, so we launched the Propel program to capitalize on this strong interest. In our most recent round, we selected just eight out of over 150 companies that pitched us technologies from storing green power to decarbonizing industry.
Renewable energy will be the centerpiece of a clean energy transition, our technology leadership extends beyond wind generation. Just last month, the Danish Energy Agency awarded Ørsted a landmark ontract for our carbon capture and sequestration Kalundborg hub. We'll capture biogenic carbon dioxide from our Danish combined heat and power plants and store over 400,000 tons of CO2 every year in the Norwegian North Sea. In one of the largest carbon removal offtake agreements by volume in the world, we've joined forces with Microsoft, which has agreed to purchase nearly 3 million tons of durable, high-quality carbon dioxide removals, a clear demand signal to scale up this emerging technology. A key focus area of our innovation initiatives is excellence in digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
We're already developing a suite of powerful capabilities unlocked by generative AI and building on our track record of pioneering AI advances. Take operations. Ørsted sends drones down into the confined spaces of our offshore wind turbines below the waterline to monitor corrosion and structural integrity. Our drones take thousands of pictures, and our in-house AI models geolocate and stitch the images together to automatically detect corrosion using deep learning neural networks. We also deploy drones and AI to inspect the insides and outsides of our turbine blades. These digital advances keep our wind farm availability at industry-leading levels, and we can cut down on the cost, time, and risk of sending manned crews out to sea. For every business function, Ørsted's built a dedicated digital laboratory, which creates cutting-edge tools like our smart bidding application, which harnesses AI for advanced weather prediction and real-time power trading.
Indeed, the era of predictable power prices is behind us as the energy transition accelerates. With more renewables surging onto the grid, Ørsted is proactively investing in the technologies we'll need to store and use the green electricity we generate. We're already a leader in deploying energy storage at massive scale, like our 1,200-megawatt hour battery at our U.S. Eleven Mile project, but we're also investing in long-duration energy storage through partnerships with Energy Dome and Highview Power. Aside from storage, we've signed an MOU to locate high-performance computing data centers exclusively for artificial intelligence alongside our U.S. wind farms. As AI training and inference drive an explosion in the demand for computing, Ørsted will be a leader in powering innovative end uses that have the flexibility to use green electricity when we produce it. Finally, we're pioneering P2X as a flexibility solution that produces clean fuels from green electricity.
We've partnered with Newlab, a cutting-edge technology incubator in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard. There, we're building the world's first floating P2X R&D platform, comprising a modular architecture to test and demonstrate emerging technologies to produce, store, and use green fuels. Back in Europe, our Project Oyster brings us full circle back to our core as the world's offshore wind leader. With funding from the European Union, we're demonstrating a combined wind turbine and electrolyzer system for offshore hydrogen production. Leadership is earned, and we don't take ours for granted. As the global energy system transforms, Ørsted will remain at its forefront. We're not waiting for the future. We're inventing it.
Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see all of you here today. I'm Daniel Lerup, the Group CFO, and I've been with the company for almost 15 years. I will be taking you through the financials, an area where we have seen great progress despite the challenging macroeconomic environment that we are in right now. If we look at some of the key metrics that we put out in connection with our last Capital Markets Day, we are still on track to delivering on the roughly 50 GW of capacity in 2030. Yes, we have seen that costs are going up, but despite that, we are still seeing a meaningful outperformance on our ROCE and EBITDA for the business plan period we guided on up until 2027.
What's driving this outperformance? Let's start by taking a look at our EBITDA up until 2027, where we've seen a significant upside of roughly 20% compared to what we were looking at at the last Capital Markets Day. The key drivers for that is first and foremost, the very balanced portfolio that we have with a very large degree of inflation-indexed revenue contracts, which is benefiting a lot from the inflationary environment that we are in. We've been engaging heavily with key stakeholders and regulators, meaning that we've also seen good progress in the support that we are getting from that side. I think the policy changes is a good example of that.
The passback in the U.S. and, of course, the general Inflation Reduction Act benefits that we are seeing. As David said earlier, we are assuming that we'll be able to secure at least 40% ITC, either through the energy community adder or the domestic content adder. Then we're also seeing that the mix of merchant exposure that we have in our portfolio, our ability to manage that through corporate PPAs at higher levels, but of course, also the upside that we have from the open merchant exposure also is a benefit in when we're looking at the numbers in this period.
This increase is an increase that we have good visibility on, as 90% of that earning in 2027 is from assets in operation, under construction, or from the awarded portfolio. This is despite the fact that we're actually seeing a reduction in the net generating capacity over that period. Again, back to the fact that, for example, Baltica 3 is not included in this period anymore. EBITDA up with roughly 20%, and our gross investments are up with less than half of that, so below 10% increase we see on our gross investments. We've seen an impact from the general cost inflation in this period, adding up to roughly 15% of cost increase, a little more than DKK 50 billion.
We've also, due to our strict focus on maximizing value in our projects, also seen that there are some projects that we are now reconfiguring and therefore are not in this period anymore. There's roughly 1 GW less assumed in this period, which roughly equates to Baltica 3. EBITDA up with 20%, our gross investments up with less than 10%, which of course means that our ROCE is also looking better in that period. We are looking into a average ROCE for that period of roughly 15%, mainly driven by the increasing EBITDA, but we're actually also seeing that our capital employed is going down in that period compared to last Capital Markets Day, which is again pulling the ROCE up.
That's through our hedge liability management, and also due to the fact that we are seeing more tax equity investments, given the increased tax credits that we'll be able to get through the Inflation Reduction Act. Just a reminder, when we talk about ROCE and put out ROCE targets, we include a lot of CapEx for the projects that we will be constructing in that same period, meaning that you have a lot of CapEx in that period that is basically not generating any earnings. If you adjusted for all of that and only looked at the ROCE for the operating portfolio, you would have a return on capital employed of roughly 18%.
If we then take a look at the projects that we have matured towards operation since the last CMD, we have divided it into two buckets. The first bucket is the European and APAC projects, and then we have the U.S. projects in the other bucket. Across these two buckets, we are seeing that IRRs are going up. In Europe and the APAC bucket, we are seeing that IRRs are going up due to the inflation adjustments, due to our regulatory engagements and the changes that are coming out of that, and also our ability to manage the merchant element in these projects. We've seen that our risk-free rate, the one that we use in our WACC, has gone up with more than 250 basis points over that two-year period.
Despite that, we still have a very healthy value creation in that portfolio of projects, where the weighted average spread to WACC is within our guided range of the 150 to 300 basis points on a life cycle level. As Rasmus said earlier, Hornsea 3 is also in this bucket, and here, value is not where we want it to be, but we believe that through maturing the key value levers, that we can progress it towards our range of 150 to 300 basis points. We have the U.S. projects, where the life cycle spread to WACC is roughly neutral. That, of course, hurts my value creation heart, that we are in such a situation.
We have built a really strong foundation that will create a lot of value for us in the future through the connections that we've made with the regulators, through the infrastructure that we are sitting on, through the scale benefits and synergies that we will get for future projects. The most rational way to look at this going forward is on a forward-looking basis, and that is only on these near-term projects that has been hit by a lot of challenges over the last couple of years. If you take that perspective, the rational decision is to progress these projects as we expect that the additional investments that we will be putting into these projects will be aligned with our value creation targets of the 150 to 300 basis points.
When we then look into new auctions and tenders. We stay committed to our industry-leading return target of the 150-300 basis points on a life cycle basis, fully cost-loaded, unlevered. Remember, this is a very ambitious target that we are putting on ourself, both due to the level, but also due to how we calculate this, because we include all CapEx costs, all acquisition costs, fully allocate all of our overhead. We don't include any divestment gains, and we don't include any trading optimization gains in these numbers, and that is why this is an industry-leading return requirement. You can ask, okay, why do you set it so high? Are you not missing out on opportunities?
We might miss out on opportunities, but we wanna make sure that we get the right projects with the best value creation. This is why we have this focus. The investment program up until 2030, that we will be applying this framework on, is an investment program of roughly DKK 475 billion up until 2030. We are now extending our business plan period up until 2030 in order to make it more simple with all of the metrics that we have out there to align them more towards 2030. The lion's share of our investments will continue to go into offshore wind, roughly 70%. This is where we see the biggest value-creating growth for our company. This is also where we have the largest competitive edge.
In onshore, we continue to see a lot of great value creation opportunities, very much helped lately by the Inflation Reduction Act, the growing regulatory support in Europe, but also due to the fact that onshore has a much faster time to market than what we are seeing in offshore, and therefore, de-risking the CapEx risk in the onshore business. We are allocating roughly 5% of our capital to, you can say, the hopefully the future of Ørsted.
We are taking a balanced approach to P2X, making sure that we don't jump into the deep end, but we will be building our capabilities over the next couple of years and decades in this area, and we think it's a balanced entry to allocate roughly 5% of our capital to that area. If we dig a little bit into the maturity profile of our CapEx and zoom in on the offshore part, we will be spending roughly DKK 335 billion towards 2030 on offshore. Roughly half of that will be spent on the assets that we already have under construction and on the near-term awarded portfolio.
We have a very high cost visibility on that part of CapEx, as roughly 90% of that CapEx is contracted. If we then move on to how will we find the sources to make all of these investments, we will see that the operating cash flow continues to be the foundation of our sources, accounting for 40%. That, of course, gives a lot of comfort, given that 80% of our earnings is coming from regulated and long-term contracted earnings on an average horizon of 16 years. We have a lot of visibility on the key element of the sources. The farm-down model will continue to be a key element of funding for us.
Tax equity, roughly 15%, and then we expect to increase our net debt with roughly 15% of the sources that will be going into these investments. On the farm-downs, we have an unrivaled track record. We basically invented the farm-down model within offshore, and it's something that we've been doing for more than a decade. We've raised DKK 200 billion through the farm-down model and made more than 20 farm-downs. Last year, where we had a more volatile, tumultuous financial market, we were able to raise DKK 30 billion from three farm-downs at NPV retentions above 100%. In our business plan towards 2030, we are assuming DKK 20 billion in proceeds every year from the farm-down model, so it's significantly less than what we raised last year.
We are in the market right now with several transactions. We continue, as we always have, see a lot of demand, and we see good prices, so this is an assumption that we are very comfortable with. We are assuming we expect to be able to farm down at NPV retentions still at around 100% NPV retention, but we, of course, put in a little bit of conservatism when we add the proceeds into our business plan. The other key funding model is, of course, our centralized financing model when it comes to debt. We fund our projects on our balance sheet, which gives us a lot of flexibility and also very competitive terms.
We are the leading issuer of green bonds. As of today, we are also the first to start leading the blue bond financing market, an area that we believe will unlock a lot of capital in the future. We are happy to take the first step, still on good terms, to take on the learnings and start educating the market on this so that we continue to get competitive financing, which we have today, which we will expect to see also in the future. We have a very prudent approach to our liquidity management. We use undrawn committed facilities to back that up, which significantly lowers the cost in order to have that strong liquidity balance that we have of roughly 100 billion DKK.
Then we have access to a wide range of financing sources, being both hybrids, senior bonds, export credit, supranationals, and so on. That ensure that we have good terms and good pricing whenever we go to the market. We have the lowest refinancing risk in the industry. Our current debt portfolio has an average maturity of more than 10 years, which, of course, gives us a lot of comfort on the rate exposure that we are sitting with.
We have deep access to the capital markets on long-dated issuance, and we continue to see a lot of demand, more demand than what we see in our peers, oversubscription of 3.6x in the last many issuance that we've made, and we continue to see very low new issue premiums on the debt that we raise. We also have a dividend policy today that increases yearly with a high single digit up until 2025, and we are getting close to that period. With the business plan that we are putting forward today, we want to extend that dividend period up until 2030. From 2026 up until 2030, you will have very good visibility on the dividends, and they will be growing with a mid-single digit every year up until 2030.
We know that dividends are important for many of our investors, and we also think it's a sign of discipline that we are handing back some of the earnings that we are making. With this dividend, we are paying out over that period, roughly 30% of our of our earnings. The capital that we have at hand, we will be investing roughly 85% of that into value-creating opportunities, and 15% of that we will be handing back to all of you, our investors. We think that's a quite good balance, considering all of the opportunities that we have. We can make a dividend policy that far out because we have that visibility on our earnings, and we have a strong balance sheet. Today, we have a quite significant headroom on our FFO to net debt.
We are above 40%. We, of course, over time, want to fully utilize our capital structure, and we will see investments go up over the coming years, meaning that we will see our capital structure coming down. We have put in conservatism, and we are at roughly 30% FFO to net debt, where we have a target of roughly 25%. We remain committed to our triple B, triple B plus rating. We will deliver on our dividend policy, and of course, committed to that, and we don't need any new equity in order to deliver on this business plan. It's fully self-funded. How will our earnings grow towards 2030?
We are looking into an earnings growth of roughly 13%-14% on EBITDA, getting us to a range of roughly DKK 50 billion-DKK 55 billion in EBITDA in 2030. Again, in order to simplify things, we've decided to change from the previous long-term earnings guidance, where it was assets in offshore and onshore assets in operations. We've changed that to group EBITDA, excluding new partnerships, so that it basically aligns with our one-year financial EBITDA guidance.
Had we kept the old method, you would have seen roughly the same growth in our earnings, ending up roughly the same place, because what we are now adding in is the earnings from P2X, bioenergy, and others, and a little bit of, let me say, existing construction agreement gains at that point in time, but which will be largely netted out by then also including all of our overhead and all of our capex of roughly DKK 5 billion. There is a net positive impact from this of a couple of billion DKK. It's nothing that changes the overall metrics in this. This is a growth that we have very good visibility on, as 75% of that EBITDA is coming from assets, operating assets under construction and from our awarded portfolio.
It's a net capacity of 25 GW that's delivering this. That EBITDA will also help support our return on capital, where we will expect an average ROCE of 14% over that period, very much driven by all of the assets that will be coming into operation. As you will see, the ROCE for this period is a little bit lower than for the period up until 2027. Two key factors driving that, we are, as the years go by, we are assuming a power price that goes down actually throughout the entire period. From 2027 until 2030, we assume that the power prices decrease with roughly 20%. That's, of course, something that is dragging the number down.
Of course, as we invest more and more, it will, of course, let me say, dilute some of the historic, very good return on capital projects that we have in our portfolio, some of the very high CFD projects that we have in the U.K.. What gives us comfort that we can deliver on this? We have a strong focus on risk management. We are managing all of our financial exposures. There are three key areas that I would like to go into. One thing is our prioritization of inflation indexation. Roughly 50% of our earnings has this inflation. Sorry, revenue has this inflation indexation, and it's long-term contracted.
We have 30% coming from, again, long-term contracted revenue, but fixed nominal. This is mainly from the U.S. portfolio and from Taiwan. Then we have 20% remaining merchant exposure, which in our mind gives a good balance between merchant and the highly regulated earnings. If we go into the inflation adjusted contracts, revenue contracts that we have, this is something that we incentivize in the business as we see it as a very good protection against cost inflations and increasing funding costs. Actually, if you look at all of the revenue contracts that we have today with the inflation indexation and look at how have they increased in value, nominal value, since our last Capital Markets Day, the increase is DKK 65 billion, and that is not a future value.
That is, the lion's share of that comes from the actual inflation that we've since seen since the last Capital Markets Day up until today. This basically more than outweighs the cost inflation that I showed you earlier on gross investments. In the future, this inflation protection can counterweight changes in the rate environment if that is driven by inflation. We give a relief in our WACC to projects with inflation protection, again, to incentivize that as we see lower risk in those projects. We very much promote inflation protection in our dialogue with regulators, where we have been very successful in Poland and also Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and expectedly, many more of the auctions to come.
This is one of the key areas that reduces risk in our business, so that is why we spend so much time with regulators, ensuring that they understand this. As I showed before, we have roughly 30% of our revenue coming from long-term fixed nominal contracts, which of course, exposes us towards interest rate increases. How we think about that is that we have a fixed rate, long-term fixed rate debt portfolio, and that roughly matches the fixed nominal exposure that we have from our assets in operations and under construction. Then we have an awarded portfolio that we are maturing towards funding. Here, we are using interest rate swaps in order to provide some protection against the interest rate exposure that we have on that part.
We are roughly 25% covered, and you will see that increase as many of these projects mature even more. Then we have the merchant part. On average, towards 2030, it's only 20% of our earnings that comes from the merchant power exposure, 80% from the long-term contracted earnings. In our mind, that creates a really good balance, and it's a good protection against the wrong-way risk, meaning that when wind is not blowing too much, we have low production impacting our regulated earnings, you would often see that power prices then go up, giving us a protection of the steady base of our earnings. We are getting this better natural balance through the new hedging framework that we have talked about at previous earnings calls.
It will help reduce the downside risk in the framework with more than 20% on our earnings, reduce collateral with more than 50%, and we will see more than a 50% reduction of the IFRS 9 effects that we've also unfortunately had to spend a lot of time on over the last year. We will see significantly fewer months where we are over-hedged. What we wanna deliver is the roughly 50 GW of installed value-creating capacity without or self-funded without any new equity. We will uphold our industry-leading return requirement of 150 to 300 basis points on a fully cost-loaded life cycle perspective.
We have a strong risk proposition with a lot of earnings coming from inflation, indexation, and a good coverage of our interest rate risk through our debt portfolio and interest rate swaps. We see a very good growth towards 2030 of 13%-14% in our EBITDA and a ROCE of 14%, and then we are extending our dividend policy until 2030. A very attractive risk-return profile with a very financially disciplined growth ahead of us. Thanks a lot for that, and, I will now hand over to Mads to wrap up.
Yes, thank you very much for hanging in there. I'm sure it's been a pretty intense three hours for all of you, with lots and lots of information. We've been really looking forward to sharing all of that with you, and now we really, really look forward to getting your questions and some real dialogue. Before we go there, allow me just to make sort of the almost impossible task of wrapping up three hours into sort of just one slide of key messages. Maybe most importantly, now you've gotten the opportunity to meet also, many, not all of, but many of my senior leadership colleagues. The rest are in the room. Hopefully, this gives you also an impression of people being very close to the subject matters that we do indeed work with on a daily basis.
The most important thing we've been trying to tell you over the last three hours is, by 2030, we will be the world's leading green energy major. We will be deploying our position and our unique capabilities to be one of the largest electricity producers in the renewable space at all. We will also, very, very importantly, be deploying the potential of our total portfolio of well over 100 GW, combined with a very strict financial discipline and focus on value creation, to ensure that we firmly commit to and deliver on our industry-leading 150 to 300 basis points spread to WACC.
We will be deploying DKK 475 billion, almost half a trillion DKK, into delivering approximately 50 GW of operational capacity by 2030. Even though that is largely unchanged, that is still one of the most ambitious build-out plans at all in our industry. We are firmly committing to and upholding our targets to stay and strengthen our position as a global offshore leader, extremely important to us, whilst at the same time continuing the journey to be a really strong and significant player in onshore in the chosen regions and be a market shaper in Power-to-X. We will ensure that we do all of this while delivering very strongly on our financial results. Daniel just shared it, 13%-14% growth in our operational earnings, around 14% return on capital. Bear in mind, with a very high visibility to the earnings that we actually...
and cash flows we have ahead of us. Strategically very important that these integrated renewable solutions that we can deliver and will deliver, combined with our ability to innovate new decarbonization solutions with our corporate customers, would be a key strategic leg on our journey going forward in all regions, but not least, also in the European region, as Rasmus told you about. We are now extending our dividend commitment with a continued growth in dividends, while not compromising the strength of our balance sheet with a fully funded plan and ensure that we uphold and protect our credit rating. Last but not least, we are very determined and dedicated to uphold and continue to shape a global sustainability leadership, which is not something we do on the side. It is who we are, it is what we commit to, it is what we shape.
With that, I invite my colleagues on stage to take your questions. We will just do a very quick reset up here with some tables, but otherwise, we really look forward to taking your questions. Thank you very much.
All right. We are now ready for the Q&A. I want to remind everyone that is with us here at the Science Museum, that if you have a question, please raise your hand, then either Valdemar or Sabine will reach you with a microphone. Please state your name and company before asking a question. Please respect only one question at a time, so we ensure we can fill out the crowd. If you participate via the live stream, or want to have a question without attribution, write an email to ir@orsted.com. I will have it sent to my screen. Without further ado, let's get started. I think we have over with Valdemar.
Oh, fab. Hello? Can you hear me? No. Hello?
Oh, I'll just shout.
No, please, just, we need the microphone.
Use the microphone. Can you hear me?
Yes, we hear you.
There you go. Okay, thank you. I've won the question lottery. I guess this is a pretty big question, and I'm sorry to ask such a narrow financial question after such a comprehensive presentation. On the capital raise, clearly it's a self-funded plan. Are you saying anything about future capital raise intentions, though? Should we assume this is basically effectively a lockup now until your next CMD, where you would perhaps revisit targets in one or two years' time, and then we're not gonna have any capital raise until then? Thank you.
I think what we can firmly say is that we have a plan now, and that is the plan we believe in, and that is fully funded. We continue to believe this is a very ambitious plan, and we are very confident in our ability to deliver that with the current capital structure that we have.
Hi, Deepa Venkateswaran from Bernstein. My question is, we do see quite a difference in the way you're looking at Hornsea 3 versus the U.S. under construction portfolio, when on the face of it, the U.S. projects do have a higher offtake price, and then, you know, even with the inflation adjustment, the U.K. one looks challenging. Could you explain what's driving your almost, you know, maybe a differential approach between the U.K. and the U.S.?
If you can, maybe, Rasmus, if you could start by commenting specifically on Hornsea Three.
Absolutely. The reason we are confident in the value creation on Hornsea 3 is because of partly the levers on revenue that we are looking at now. It is the robustness that we are starting to see on CapEx. It is also very much as I talked about, the scale of the project. Specifically, on the revenue levers and what makes me confident saying that I'm firmly convinced that we will, over time, progress towards our guided range, which is you can say different than what we are saying in the U.S., since we are talking life cycle here, is in particular, the flexibility around the CFD. We can do corporate PPAs up to 25% of the entire wind farm if we'd like.
We can also decide to keep that merchant. We are working on storage, also on revenue, in connection with the onshore substation. We are working on behind the meter initiatives also on revenue. We basically see a range of levers that makes me confident saying what I am.
Maybe to add, remember also that we are penalizing the U.S. projects for having the fixed nominal CFD.
... revenue structure, which again, then when you compare them, gives a benefit to our Hornsea 3 project.
Maybe just one comment from me as well. I mean, the U.S. projects were bid and won many years ago. The Hornsea 3 project was just bid and won last year. We've had more time for the inflation and interest rate adjustments to affect our projects. Of course, it's a new market, and while many of the things that have impacted us are generic global things, which just happen to be affecting our large U.S. portfolio, there are for sure, some bespoke issues in the U.S. that have, you know, led to some of the cost increases, et cetera.
Yes.
Yes, thank you. Thank you. Sorry. Good afternoon. Louis Boujard from ODDO BHF. My question would be the following: I think that you mentioned in your presentation that you take some relief on the work competition, notably on the basis of inflationary contracts. Could you elaborate a little bit on this topic and maybe give an idea of the magnitude of the kind of relief that you could take in these assumptions?
No, I don't wanna give you a specific number, because that's, of course, something that is a bit sensitive also, when we are bidding into auctions, knowing what kind of relief that we give. Again, if you look up in most academia and how they view inflation and how it protects projects, I think you would get a pretty good idea.
Kristian Tornøe, ACP. David, in your presentation, you mentioned that the three near-term U.S. projects do actually not qualify for the 40% ITC, as current guidance stands. What need to happen for the 40% to be reached? Does that also mean that when you say that they are value neutral right now, it's actually under the assumption that future guidance supports this uplift?
Yeah, thanks for the question. First, to clarify the second part of your question, yes, the value neutral from a life cycle return standpoint does assume a 40% ITC across all 3 projects. Right now, we have preliminary guidance on these 2 extra bonus ITCs, 10% each. Given that preliminary guidance, not all 3 projects qualify for 40%. We've been in discussions with very senior people in Washington, D.C., in the White House, and have expressed the. You know, they understand the challenges that these projects have, and they also recognize, you know, Ørsted's leadership in starting to build this industry in the U.S.
We believe it confidently that as they come out with their final guidance, that we can get these projects to qualify for one or the other, or potentially both of these, extra 10% ITC bonuses, so.
Yeah. Hi, it's Peter Bisztyga from Bank of America here. Thank you very much for your presentations today. I was particularly interested in the Power-to-X stuff. I think that we haven't heard that much detail about it before, but I was wondering, in your 2030 targets with the 2 GW, what assumptions have you made? Or indeed, what assumptions do you need regarding government support mechanisms, tax credits, some sort of subsidy, or are those targets based on a fully commercial arrangement? Would be very interested to hear a little bit about how the economics work from that perspective. Thank you.
The 2 GW that we're looking at, we expect that to be, broadly speaking, evenly split between Europe and the United States. Of course, in the United States, the projects will benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act. In Europe, we expect them to be able to benefit from All sorts of things, apparently. No, from any one of the sort of patchwork of support mechanisms that Europe is offering, whether that's the EU Innovation Fund. We already have IPCEI funding for both the early phases of both the Dutch and the Danish projects in our portfolio, and also expect to put projects into the European Hydrogen Bank auctions, as and when those start. There is significant public funding available, and we will be looking to tap it to the extent possible, along with other pools of capital, as those become available.
We do see significant interest in investing in this relatively new sector from third parties as well.
Hi, it's Sam Arie here from UBS. Thanks so much for the presentation. I thought it was excellent. I think I want to ask a question about the financial equation, because obviously, you've done some magic today to make, you know, sources and uses of cash all add up. Well done, Daniel. My question is for you, particularly on the farm down element of the plan. I suppose it's, it's great news, but a little bit surprising that you're so comfortable with, I think you said DKK 20 billion proceeds from farm downs every year through the rest of the decade, when obviously some of the projects are a bit challenged and rates have gone up.
Can you tell us, in aggregate, what is the NPV to CapEx assumption that you have on your farm-downs to get those DKK 20 billion proceeds every year through the plan?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Sam. Remember, we've been in this market for more than a decade. We have deep relationships with all of the key infrastructure investors and pension funds, and they are very hungry to get ownership in these assets. We get that confirmed year over year over year. As I said, we are very active in the market right now, and we see good demand. We have no reason to believe that we can't continue with that. On the NPV to CapEx multiple, again, it's very project-by-project specific, so it's a very difficult multiple to give.
In essence, what ends up being the gain that you make depends on what is the value creation spread on top of the WACC for the individual project, as we are seeking to get this 100% NPV retention. Meaning that, for example, on a Hornsea 3 project, where we know we are looking into a higher spread to WACC compared to the U.S. near-term portfolio, you would then see a higher gain on a Hornsea 3 project compared to the near-term offshore U.S. projects. The level of the WACC doesn't define whether it makes sense to make the divestment or not.
If we can crystallize value upfront at 100% NPV retention, basically retaining all of the NPV, and go out and reinvest that into 150 to 300 basis points, then it makes sense. Then it's a value-creating circle that we've that we've created, and we are confident that we can continue to do that.
Thank you. Rob Pulleyn from Morgan Stanley. The focus on value creation is very clear and I think comprehended by everyone. I'd just like to ask, within that, the 28 GW installed target for offshore wind by 2030, you've been quite clear if projects do not stack up, and you mentioned a few, you would walk away from them, which seems very reasonable. The question is: How many GW can you walk away from and still get to that 28 GW? Should be the message, which I think was there, but let's clarify, is that 28 GW therefore a minimum that you will deliver? Because you could, of course, turn these projects around and win several of the auctions upcoming. Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot, Rob. This is the plan that we have now with the 28 GW of offshore, is the best balance, focusing on value creation across all the technologies that we have. Right now, like we said, previously, our plan was around 30 GW. Now we're saying 28. That is, of course, in light of, not least, you will also have noticed the variation in what especially Rasmus and David said, that we have quite a bit of a regional variation. That is simply because we want to ensure that we have the flexibility in our portfolio. We are reconfiguring a couple of projects right now, which means that right now, that timeline is not known, which essentially is a key reason for us also bringing that down.
It may well be that we can still construct those by 2030, right now we are not taking that assumption, we want to say offshore has gone through a challenging period. We are firmly convinced and sure that we can continue to create value within our guided range in the future on the future projects, we could surely grow faster. Right now, the balance that we strike with the 28 is something we feel very confident that we can deliver with the value creation. We right now assume that we won't change that plan, but should that happen, especially the flexibility between the regions could, of course, happen. That's why David said three to five.
If, for example, if we come out with strongly value-creating wins, which it would be in both New York 3 and in Rhode Island, we would then have a situation where we say, "Does that need a rebalancing to Europe, or how do we do that?" That's the flexibility we need to have in our plan, but right now, this is the best estimate we have, and it's the best plan that we have at hand with exactly the 28.
Hi, Ahmed Farman from Jefferies. Thank you for the presentation and all the details on the business plan. My question is actually on the awarded projects in Europe. Can you give us some further granularity on where do you see the IRR to WACC spread on the three awarded projects in Europe? How much visibility do you have on that from today's perspective, which I presume is a function of how much CapEx you have locked in and the regulatory and mitigation factors? Thank you.
Rasmus?
Absolutely. Thank you for the question. I, of course, understand exactly where you are coming from. In terms of our expectations for value creation on Hornsea 3, it is as we've talked about, that we do see that we, over time, would be able to progress the project towards the guided range. I on the other projects in our awarded portfolio, so that would be Baltica 2 and Baltica 3. On Baltica 2, we see sufficient value creation. Daniel has been very clear throughout the day about what that means.
On Baltica 3, that is not the case, even though it is life cycle positive, spread to WACC, it's not good enough for us right now, which is why we have taken a step back and reconfigured so that it can meet our requirements to value.
If you just, if you took a look at the total portfolio that Daniel showed in Europe and APAC, that total portfolio is within our guided range, and we have both Hornsea 3 and the awarded portfolio within that.
Correct.
That is included in the Europe and APAC portfolio, which is within the guided range.
All right. I think we'll take one question from with the inbox. The question reads: How do you want to ensure the availability of enough offshore installation vessels for your plan, given the evident shortage projected over the next years?
Do you want to take that?
Yeah. As I mentioned, we work in different methodologies. One is long-term agreement, which we have already in place for about 10 GW. We also do project-specific, because in some countries we have also E.U. tender to follow. We are also in very active dialogue with several suppliers on vessels for the remaining capacity. It is important to also see and understand that it's not only about securing a vessel, we are also, at the same time, looking at what is the development of the technology. As we go towards the end of the decade in larger turbines or foundations, then we might need a different mix of vessels.
we are in active dialogue with several vessel suppliers to further secure the capacity. But I'm really confident with what we have already in the long term, and also with the amount of vessels that is coming into the market in the next four years.
Dan Togo, Carnegie. A question on the 27 gigawatt you plan to have net to contribute to EBITDA in 2030. How is that distributed among the assets?
That's not a detail that we have in there, but the starting point is that we divest everything, farm down everything down to 50%. You can basically take the gross capacity and then subtract 50%. And then, of course, the biomass-fired power plants are also in there, and we're not looking to farm down those. That's why you are a little bit higher than what would otherwise give you roughly 25 GW.
Daniel, maybe just one thing just for the benefit of the audience, that those three near-term U.S. projects were in a JV in those projects already, and they're already 50% owned by Eversource. It's announced that they want to exit the JV, someone else will step into that 50%.
Hi, David Paz from Wolfe Research. Just a question on, David, on the U.S. projects. You were asked about the bonus tax credits, assumed in the value neutral, but you also noted changes or continued progress on OREC terms. Those are any assumed changes in that value creative? In other words, do you need to have changes to those OREC terms to maintain value neutral?
Yeah. To reiterate what I said earlier, these projects have experienced a lot of turmoil between rising inflation, interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks. To get back to value neutral on a life cycle basis is, we think, very impressive. It does require certain assumptions, and we highlighted in the presentation that we do need some adjustments to the ORECs, primarily the request that we've made to the State of New York, which, again, we've been working with them for six, seven months and, you know, feel confident that we'll get the support we need in order to make the adjustment to that OREC.
Likewise, we need to make sure that we get the full benefit of tax passback on our Ocean Wind One project, which, again, we've been speaking with the State of New Jersey for a while, and we expect a resolution on that relatively shortly. We have high confidence that these assumptions that we're taking will come true, and yes, that will take us to a life cycle neutral NPV on those projects.
Thank you. It's Dominic Nash from Barclays. Thank you for your presentation. The question I've got is, like, is a clarity one, please, on the 50 GW target and the DKK 475 billion CapEx program. Can you just confirm again that the 50 GW target is gross of JVs and EPC partners, but a DKK 475 billion CapEx it looks like it's net of the JV partners. Could you give us some sort of numbers as to what you think the net GW that you will be developing, developed by 2030 will be, and/or also what the gross CapEx number? I think in the last capital markets day, I think it was a DKK 450 to DKK 350, and I think the DKK 475 is comparable to the DKK 350, isn't it?
It is correct. We don't have JV CapEx in there, and we don't have the CapEx that the partner contributes with after we've done a construction agreement farm-down. The way you should think about it is that when you look at the two buckets, near-term awarded projects and the pre-2030 projects that is not in the near-term portfolio, that we assume that we take roughly 60%-70% on average of that CapEx. You would have to add roughly 50% on top of those two numbers in order to come to a gross number that we, in last Capital Markets Day, called the green investments. In order to simplify things, we kept that out, but it's roughly that magnitude.
Thanks very much. It's Jenny Ping from Citi. I guess, just to follow on from that, if I look at your onshore and offshore CapEx numbers and look at the GW that you're looking to deploy on the back of that, the onshore numbers look incredibly high, and the offshore numbers look incredibly low on a euro per megawatt basis. Is that just because of the gross net element, or is that also because of excluding cable costs and net of ITC, et cetera? If you can clarify that would be great.
Yeah. I think if you did the change that I talked about before, where you include the JV impact and the construction agreement CapEx part on the offshore, then you would get to a more meaningful multiple than just taking the numbers there and dividing it by the capacity in there. On the onshore part, I don't know whether you want to comment on it, but there is, of course, an element of conservatism in our numbers. We think it's a good level when you're considering the long-dated CapEx assumptions.
Meike Becker, you're back up on HSBC. Thank you for the presentation and taking my question. I have one on the new markets. You outlined your strategy and how you select the markets. Could you take Spain as an example to elaborate a little bit more in detail what you like about the market and how you think about it? Thank you.
Rasmus?
Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. The reason that we have decided to move into Spain recently are manifold. We basically have applied the framework that I talked about before. That being said, we don't see Spain as a core market. We have these sort of five Northern European core markets, where we spend 80% of our CapEx. Spain is in the other pocket. The reason that we are happy being in Spain right now is that we see a lot of potential, both on the onshore side, in particular on solar and storage, but also on floating. We have the right partnership in place with Repsol, we have the ability to shape.
Especially on the solar side, we see scale, and we see potential for speed. Hopefully, when we are on the other side of the upcoming Spanish election, that this is an area where we can see our pipeline of 9 GW of onshore picking up quite fast.
Tancrède Fulop for Morningstar. Thank you for the presentation. A question on the U.S.. U.S. utilities are generally skeptical about offshore wind, and your current partners are seeking to sell their stake. Don't you think it might be challenging to find partners in future projects, for instance, if you win New York 3 or Rhode Island?
David?
Yes. I think the decision to partner with U.S. utilities was a wise one at the time. It was before I was at Ørsted, but we were new in the U.S. market. We wanted local incumbents that could help us with the ground game and the stakeholder engagement. At the time, the returns looked promising to these utility investors. Over time, as the projects got delayed in the Trump administration and started to experience challenges, we realized that those partners, maybe as much as we all get along, and we like each other and we supported each other, it wasn't really the right business profile for them. They're used to regulated returns, primarily transmission-regulated returns. Now you see our U.S. utility customers wanting to exit offshore wind.
Both of them explicitly said that they're pro-offshore wind, and they want to support the offshore wind build-out in the U.S., but they want to do the onshore transmission upgrades needed to accept offshore wind. It's just really more about business models and their, you know, comfort with kind of an IPP business model versus a regulated return and a new technology. Likewise, I think in the meantime, we've built a very strong stakeholder engagement corporate affairs team. We have a ground game in New Jersey, in New York, in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, and of course, in Washington, D.C., and we think that we've built a very strong brand and very strong capability in that area. We're confident that we can build these projects now without those JV partners.
As we think about who will step in, to Eversource Energy's position, for example, as a JV partner, we have looked through rights, and we've been in coordination with them all the way through. We know which types of investors are looking at that position, and we're comfortable that there will be a new buyer relatively soon. Likewise, now we own 100% of Ocean Wind One. Again, at some point, when it's appropriate, we'll probably do a farm-down of that project, and again, we'll control who the investor will be, but we would have confidence that we could find an investor for that as well.
All right, we'll take another written question. This one is coming from Alberto Gandolfi from Goldman Sachs. On a like-for-like basis, you are essentially targeting a project IRR with a WACC of 200-400 basis points. You also said you want to be disciplined in future auction. Does that mean that for now, we should think about more, mid to upper end of this range?
No, I think what we are doing is we are firmly committing to that range. Depending on where we are, depending on the risk profile of this, and depending on the opportunity set, we will go no further in specifying, rather than it, that it is within that range, which we again, commit very firmly to delivering in. That's as close as we can get it.
I guess it's a three-part question. I mean, the way that I value an investment, first is the volatility of the top line or, you know, the earnings. What I'm trying to assess is that, how volatile is your top line? I mean, it seems to me that, you know, what's the percentage of your revenue that is tied to PPAs, and how sensitive these PPAs are to inflation or, you know, whatever, you know, merchant power prices? If I may, I mean, the oil companies normally give a sensitivity to oil price, 10% up and 10% down. What I'm trying to get is that if merchant prices move up 10% or down 10%, how much your revenue will be sensitive?
The second part is, I mean, you show a very interesting chart of the OPEX coming down, right, in a weak scale. Then you have this also target of, I think it's 13%-14% EBITDA growth. What I'm trying to assess is that how much of that operational leverage is really tied it into this margin expansion that you can have in the future? Because it wasn't clear to me that if this 13%-14%, you know, already tied in, you know, into your potential of margin expansion. The last part is, I mean, in terms of the PPAs, you have these 55 corporate PPAs globally, right? What's the maturity of these PPAs and, you know, and your ability, you know, to sign more PPAs?
You know, is it a question that can you sign much more, or you want to keep that 20%, you know, open to merchant prices? If I may, you know, the farm-downs. Is there any way-
I think we'll start with those.
Yeah, let's start with those.
Will be the last I promise.
There's only one question.
Yeah. On the farm-downs, I mean-
I think I will try to start these questions. First of all, when it comes to our revenue and EBITDA, 80% is coming from regulated and long-term contracted earnings with an average lifetime of 16 years. We have a very strong foundation and visibility on that 80% of our earnings and the revenue. Through that, you also get a sensitivity in the sense that we've said what the EBITDA is in 2030, you will know roughly 20% of that is from merchant exposure, and roughly 80% of that is regulated and contracted earnings. Then you can work with the power prices.
A rough sensitivity is that on our offshore portfolio, if you lower merchant prices with 20%, it's a little more than DKK 1 billion. If you shift the power curve down 20% throughout that period, it is roughly 1 percentage point on ROCE. On the OpEx question that you had, I think it's important to be aware of that when you look at the full value of a... Especially the offshore wind part, optimizing and using synergies and scale on the OpEx is, of course, extremely important, and we have a lot of levers there that we are working with that is adding value. Usually, the gross margin on an offshore wind farm is, you know, close to 80%.
It's not, it's not the OPEX that's gonna drive a lot of the EBITDA growth that we are looking into optimizing, that is very much due to new assets coming on stream, inflation adjustments, working with the regulators. On the corporate PPA part, as I said, roughly 16 years of average remaining lifetime on that. Again, it's an area where we are very active in the market. I don't know, Rasmus, if you want to put a couple of comments on how we see the European market on corporate PPAs.
I can absolutely. We have entered into almost 1 GW of corporate PPAs, and the PPAs we have in our portfolio are. Remember that the starting point of them is typically when the wind farm comes on stream. They, in this case, when it's a German wind farm, starts in 2025. When you talk about the maturity and the lifetime, that's your starting point. When we, for instance, say that we have a 25-year corporate PPA with BASF, it starts in 2025.
... and you see maturity on all of our European offshore wind corporate PPAs of more than 10 years. We seek to ensure, also, back to what Daniel has been talking about, that going forward, they are all indexed, and also they are all as produced. We see, final comment, increasingly strong demand in that market.
Mm-hmm.
We see prices coming up relatively dramatically.
Frank from Cardano. I only have one question. On inflation index revenue, you mentioned that in the U.S. and Taiwan contracts, they are fixed nominal. Do you see any potentials for them to be inflation indexed?
I think we can say that the, I mean, the retrospective inflation indexing that we are looking at for Sunrise specifically, that we put in a position, is essentially neutralizing what has happened, that will give us a meaningful uplift in that, in the OREC price that we have gotten. Apart from that, getting back now and renegotiating generally on these projects, I would say that the likelihood of that, apart from what we have done, would probably be relatively slim.
Bear in mind that, for example, in Taiwan, the headroom that we had in our business case, that even after the inflationary impact, which by the way, has been smaller in Taiwan, then we are still seeing a very meaningful value creation there. These are, we're saying, the U.S. projects s again, sorry, David, that is again, where we're seeing the main challenges. That is where on the Sunrise, which is that's where we have the best chances of getting that inflation indexing retrospectively. Also bear in mind that we have other regulatory levers which would help those business cases, especially the II benefit power spec.
It's clear to all customers, both, states, governments, and corporates, that the developers want more inflation protection. That's why we've also seen the changes in Poland, in Rhode Island, New York, and also the upcoming Massachusetts auction.
Yes. Good afternoon, Vincent Ayral from JP Morgan. Thank you for this very good presentation, and actually, there were very good questions, actually, from my colleagues before. I'll go to a follow-up on the previous multi-step question, but don't worry, it's just on the commodity exposure here. I think I heard during the presentation that you assume power price reset by about 20%, some line of guidance. I'd like to understand how that works out with the power market reform we have in Europe in general. We got it in Europe, we're likely to get it in U.K. as well, over the timeline to 2030. What are you assuming regarding this power market reform? How do you see it coming, you know, level and timeline?
Any color on this would be extremely appreciated. Thank you.
Start with that.
I think on the power price assumptions, what we do is that we use forwards in the front, usually two to five years in our modeling, and then we move to a fundamental in-house model. We are assuming decreasing power prices throughout the period. Power prices going down with roughly 40% as of today until 2027, and then a further 20% down from 27 to 2030.
Any comments on the power market reform?
I can add a little bit. The basic assumption is that the marginal pricing model that we currently have in Europe will continue to exist. That's an underlying assumption which we are quite confident about. Obviously also on the very short term, we see this month that also governments around Europe are looking into whether or not to prolong the cap where we also. There are a few exceptions, but overall, we also see due to the easing of the power price spike, that we see the caps being released. Fundamentally, for the long term, we assume that marginal pricing will continue to exist.
Hello, it's Mark Freshney from Credit Suisse. I apologize in advance, David, for coming back to your three problem children and also asking you mean questions. On timeline, for the U.S., the three, you know, Sunrise, Ocean Winds, and Revolution, when can we expect the BOEM consents? When can we expect the discussions with the IRS to complete, and when can we expect with the PSC to get agreement on the ORECs, et cetera? You've spoken a lot about returns, and you've given a lot of information there, but just in terms of timeline, that's arguably the bit that we don't have.
Yeah, I don't think it's a hard question, so, thanks for asking. Really, our expectation is that we will be able to meet all the requirements for the boundary conditions for FID by the end of this year for all three projects. They'll be staggered a little bit, ideally, Ocean Wind One first, and then Revolution, and then Sunrise.
Hopefully, FID by the end of the year. That kind of tracks the permitting milestones, the federal permitting milestones, which are public. You can go find them on the BOEM dashboard, but we expect our permits, our final federal permits for those three projects to all come later this year. On the resolution of some of the assumptions. It's my expectation that we should be able to have some resolution with the state of New Jersey relatively soon. I would maybe hedge and say, you know, this summer, but could be faster than that. On the resolution with the state of New York, it's our expectation that if we follow their kind of regulatory process, we should have feedback from them by October.
It could be delayed, but the fastest we could have feedback from them through the PSE is in early October, and that will align with our FID on Sunrise, so we'll know the answer on that. Likewise, on final guidance from the IRS, it's our expectation that that would be probably late summer, Q3 as well. We're trying to line up these FIDs with the permitting milestones and other boundary conditions, along with the shoring up of the business cases, and that's how we see this playing out over the next half of the year.
Maybe just to add one thing, as you call it, the problem child, and of course, something that we're working very hard for. You know, taking a top-down portfolio view on this, these U.S. projects account for a little more than 10% of the investment plan that we have. It's, of course, important that we work to further optimize the value creation in those projects, but on a portfolio level, you know, it's around 10%.
They're my babies, they're not my problem children. I love them.
Richard Alderman, BTIG. Just following on from Jenny's question earlier and your answer to that, in terms of the conservative nature of your assumptions on CapEx per megawatt for onshore, and also Vincent's question just now. If you're assuming power prices are falling progressively in Europe and elsewhere through the decade, what are your assumptions on ASPs for turbines, particularly in the next one to tw years? Where do you see the peak in that process, is the first one. Just listening to your answer. I appreciate we're in a high inflation environment, and at the moment, you're turning on significant offshore capacity. By clearly, that does drive your EBITDA margin, depending on what your power price assumptions are and costs, et cetera.
If I take you back to the capital markets day when we were last in Copenhagen, two occurrences ago, one of the interesting things you said then was that you planned to take quite a significant proportion of your third-party O&M contracts with the turbine manufacturers back in-house. Do you still plan to do that? Because as we go into that lower capex, sorry, lower power price environment, that would make a meaningful difference if you were describing what you're saying at the moment in terms of your cost savings are as good, if not better, in terms of running a 50-megawatt turbine as opposed to a 6-megawatt turbine.
I think I don't know if we can answer specifically on the assumptions for ASP, but maybe on how we work with the forward-looking outlook on inflation. The average selling price would maybe if you could give some comments to that, and you could comment on the, on taking the contracts in, Richard.
I don't know if I understood the question completely, because you were also referring of us taking the ownership of the turbine. Maybe can you clarify?
I think the average selling price of the onshore turbines-
Yes we see the development going forward.
Yes. No?
That's not an assumption, that, we should give.
No, not specifically, maybe I was, maybe what we could do, Virginie, is to give a perspective on how we work with the forward-looking view on the pricing and the CapEx inflation. How we do that.
Oh, yeah. Yes, yes.
If you can give a general comment on that.
Yeah, no, I mean, in generally, we have a costing model, which is a model that not only look at the cost of the CapEx, but all the data that we have gathered over the years, also coming in, the technical data that our engineers are giving on the average energy production of a turbine. That is, in fact, all in our model, and then we can, through that model, really look, and we normally look about eight years to 10 years ahead. It is quite a complex in-house model based on cost, technology, data of the field, and the information that our engineers work very closely with our suppliers.
Yeah, coming up to the taking in-house of the operations, I think as we've highlighted here, we've continued to do that. We see that that has been adding value to us. I mean, going forward, the key thing is that we operate in the correct manner, the overall wind farm. If the suppliers are able to deliver competitive offerings around the turbine itself, then in the right circumstances, we might take them as the maintainer of a turbine, but it is, again, a value question.
The overall flexibility of how we operate at the moment and the level of maturity in the OEMs at the moment in the offshore space, means that we're still getting good value out of doing the whole thing ourselves, but I'm sure that they will continue to mature their offering and come with interesting concepts that we would, of course, consider going forward for the actual turbines themselves.
Lars Heindorff from Nordea. A question regarding farm downs and the ROCE target of 14%. If I try to back out the historical farm downs, get to a average ROCE around 8%-9%. Now you say that you expect around about DKK 20 billion on a yearly basis going forward. Just want to hear your view on what kind of ROCE ex farm downs, which are, by nature, a bit lumpy and unpredictable, you're expecting.
It's not a number I have for you. We can, of course, come back to some consideration on that. I think what's important to be aware of is that we are assuming that the gain part will, of course, be lower in the future, as many of the historical farm downs were based on, you know, much higher CFD levels, much higher IRR levels. The level of gains in ROCE is relatively going down as we move into our 150-300 basis points range.
I think we have time for one or two more questions. Right here and here.
Thanks again. Jenny Ping from Citi again. Just going back to the farm down number, the DKK 150 billion. I was intrigued, in the presentation, you talk about selective more than 50% farm downs. What does that assume in that 150? Does it assume straightforward 50/50, or are you assuming further than 50%? Thanks.
There is an element of taking an opportunistic approach to farm-downs and JVs. That means that on some of our assets, we could potentially see ownership going below the 50% in less established markets or, for example, in P2X. So in P2X, we are assuming a minority share, meaning that here we will, for some of them, go below 50%, and some we will be at roughly 50%.
All right, one final question.
I have a question for Olivia. In the BECCS industry, what everybody wants to know is what you can say about the pricing on the contracts you have with Microsoft for the negative emissions. What can you say on the pricing regarding that?
Not much, Mark.
No, other than it's good.
It is. I'll say that we cannot go into the specific pricing, but it is that contract that enable us to give the winning bid to the Danish Energy Agency and win that 430 tons a year. That, unfortunately, is as close as we can get it.
All right. On that note, we will end the Q&A. I will hand over the word to Mads for final words. Then afterwards, invite all of you to join us for lunch and networking downstairs.
Yes, I won't take more of your time. Essentially, we are already a little bit over time. A big thank you to all of you for prioritizing to be with us, and an even bigger thank you for your trust in our company. We are fully convinced and fully committed to delivering on the path that we have laid out today, I can say, I feel privileged to have the best possible team behind me to do just that. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for your trust. We look forward to the continued dialogues over the coming days, weeks, and months. Thank you.