Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Photosol day. It is my pleasure to welcome you today. I will be emceeing this presentation. So the day will be split in two parts: this plenary session in the morning, which will be chaired by Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, Managing Partner, Marc Jacquot, Group CFO at Rubis, and the two founders of Photosol, David Uccelli and David Guinard and Robin Uccelli, sorry about this, together with Guillaume Thrierr, Head of Financing.
During this afternoon, you will have the opportunity to participate to workshops on dedicated topics: building a plant in France, the financial model, the international development, and the small PV scale. You will be rotating between workshops, so do not hesitate if you need any help in logistics. I will now be leaving the mic to Clarisse.
Thank you, Clémence. Welcome, and good morning, everyone. I am Clarisse Gobin-Swiecznik, Managing Partner at Rubis. Today, I'm going to talk about safe, reliable, and sustainable energy. I'm very proud today of presenting our new branch, Photosol, and to offer you a deep dive into the business model. So what does it mean today to be a global energy provider?
It's about... Sorry. It's about ensuring safe, reliable energy for all, as affordable as possible. Recent events and disruptions have reminded us how crucial it is to have safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy. There is another major challenge we can't ignore today: climate change. Industry needs low-carbon energy to grow faster to meet the rising global demand. Any successful transitions needs to address all three parts of this challenge: safe, reliable, and sustainable.
Now, if the energy transition has started, it differs across country, and it doesn't mean the same thing whether you live in Europe or in emerging countries. But for all, it means enabling a fair transition, one that is equitable, adapted to, and differentiated country by country. This kind of transition cannot be left to chance. It's our conviction.
It takes a company with a clear, ambitious strategy and disciplined financial execution to drive growth and create value for its stakeholders. This is who we are. So we are a company whose business lies in sourcing, shipping, storing, and distributing essential fuels and liquefied gas to a diverse customer base, private and public companies, airports, industries, but also individuals for their everyday needs. We manage the entire logistics chain from the source to the final destination.
In this context, we decided to enter the renewable energy business to widen our offer to meet European needs. By entering solar, we expanded our value chain presence to the role of energy generation. This is where value is captured. We cover more than forty countries, where we adapt our products and solution to local needs and regulations. Our strengths lies in our ability to operate locally, regionally, and internationally.
This unique footprint was built through strategic investments and pioneering initiatives. We operate in countries at very different stages of economic, environmental, and energy development. Wherever we are today, we deliver operational excellence and service, while ensuring the best possible economic condition for our customers. As you can see here, we are a diversified group. For 35 years, we have grown steadily and profitably with a dynamic and successful track record of targeted acquisitions.
We are a company that has always succeeded in financing its growth while remunerating its shareholders. We are a company that employs the best people, attracted by the scope of the business and its entrepreneurial spirit, the DNA of the company. We are also a company of pioneers, entering new markets and geography to continue its growth trajectory. So we are pioneers, just told you before. So renewable energy is our new investment.
This is a well-thought and well-planned decision. Renewable energy in general, and solar energy in particular, has a strong business case, supported by solid growth trends for: The first one is a booming demand in electricity, driven by growth and demographics. The second one, it's a competitive pricing. Solar today has the most competitive pricing in the renewable energy sector.
The third one is a stable legal framework, that was not the case 10 years ago, set at the European level and driven by the Green Deal. The first point, it's a decentralized system encouraging local production to boost energy security and sovereignty. In short, we believe solar power provides a reliable, safe, sustainable, and affordable energy source that can be produced locally in line with the company's strategy.
For us, Photosol is the perfect partner for different reasons. Four reasons. The first one is that it's a pure player in the solar business, with a strategic focus in the ground-mounted solar plants. It's a big difference, because to catch the growth, you need to build huge installations. It's also an established player with a solid track record in the past, and a big pipeline.
They also have something that we are very attached to, an entrepreneurial spirit with experienced manager working in the company for more than 10 years, and Robin will come back on that, and they also have something we really like, a strict financial discipline to create value, so for us, Photosol is the perfect fit. Now, let me give you a quick overview of what is Photosol today, so Photosol is active in four countries, but mainly in France. 98% of the business today is in France. Photosol employs over 250 people, that has been more than doubled since the acquisition in 2022.
The secured portfolio, which will be the plan of the day to explain what is the secured portfolio, has also doubled since 2022, and the level of advanced development and the development pipeline is constantly growing, catching the market opportunities and demonstrating the expertise of the team. So how do we see Photosol in three years in terms of secured portfolio and EBITDA? We aim for a 2.5 gigawatts of secured portfolio.
Today, we will introduce two new notions: Power EBITDA, so the EBITDA generating by power plants already in operation; and secured EBITDA, to show that the value of Photosol is already embedded and is growing through the development of this pipeline. So, let's have a look now at the renewable electricity market by 2030 in Europe. Between now and 2030, electric needs are set to increase by a factor of 1.3 in Europe, and inside this, solar energy share will be multiplied by three.
It shows the growth potential in the solar market. Recent declarations told that in France, between now and 2035, the share of solar power in the energy mix should increase fivefold to reach 100 gigawatts. Let's talk now about the main market for Photosol France. Contrary to some markets, which are very volatile and exposed to speculative prices, France is a super secure market, with long-term revenue streams and a strong financing system, with fixed interest rates and a non-recourse guarantee and a non-recourse debt.
Therefore, we have significant ambitions in France, supported by a legal framework encouraging the development of solar, but also of agrivoltaism, a market in which Photosol is a pioneer, and it's... David will come back on that. In this framework, it's important to seize as many opportunities as possible in this growing market, secure as many projects as possible in a context of long-term contracts backed by reliable counterparties, French state or major French companies.
In addition, we have started our diversification, as we believe Photosol recognized expertise is relevant to expand in complementary areas of activities and technologies, including battery storage. Since 2023, we are targeting small solar installations of less than three megawatt for B2B customers, which also benefit from high and secure long-term tariff. The development of this activity also enables the company to develop synergies inside the group.
We work in partnership with certain Rubis Energy affiliates to develop this solution for our B2B customer there in France, in French overseas territories, but also in English-speaking Caribbean. Our diversification, and David will come back on that, is also geographic. There again, our development is backed by a supportive legal framework, where the ambitions for solar development under the European Green Deal are significant.
We are working both on South Europe, with Italy and Spain, that you can see here, but also in Eastern Europe, with, for example, Poland or Romania. Regarding Italy, Italy is a very similar market to France. The government's objective is to multiply by three the share of solar in the total electricity consumption by 2030. We acquired there last year a 100-megawatt ready-to-build portfolio, which is located in areas identified by the government for the development of solar power plants, so northern and central Italy, so in addition, the development in Italy of solar power plants is currently benefiting from strong public support, reflected in easier permit approvals, storage options, and a fast-growing PPA market since it opened in 2018.
Regarding Spain, it's totally different because Spain is the most mature solar market in Europe, but is still strongly supported by the government, who want to multiply by four the share of solar production in the total electricity consumption by 2030. Our aim, our aim here is to target less developed solar plants above Barcelona, which offer local development opportunities and benefit from an advantage PPA market, so Eastern Europe also holds great potential.
The market is less mature there, is totally different. The solar market there is opening up and is beginning to shape up, driven by a strong political will to replace carbon-based power plants dependent on Russian coal or Russian gas or coal. Regulations, European financial supports, and a favorable legislative context are being put in place to anchor a strong growth in renewable energies. So now, Marc, Rubis CFO, will share with you where we stand and where we are heading in 2027.
Good morning. I am the finance guy. I'm gonna tell you where we're going and share with you some numbers. So today, we are concentrated in France, with 96% of the portfolio, secured portfolio there. Why France?
You know, Photosol used to be implemented in the U.S., and they sold their assets. So in a context where some difficulties happened, you know, in the U.S., in some company, in some solar companies, I want just to underline the big differences between U.S. and French markets. In the U.S., the revenues are based on PPA, exposed to spot, and they are very dependent on unstable local tax policies. In France, that's totally different. You have long-term contracts, more than 20 years, backed by the government, and at fixed rates indexed on inflation.
The financing mirrors the revenues, so it means that in France, you have long-term financings at fixed rates. Also, it's important to understand that the solar debt is what we call non-recourse. So non-recourse, it means that the lenders, they have so much confidence in your revenue scheme, that they don't ask for additional guarantees. It doesn't mean that we will not reimburse if something is going wrong.
It means the lenders, they assume it cannot go wrong. Also worth mentioning that when we calculate the leverage debt ratios governance of Rubis Energy, obviously, the non-recourse debt is not included here. So that's why we are in France. Also, we put a foot, you know, in the rooftop business and started to develop in other European countries. Why the B2B rooftop business?
Because the regulation just changed and became more attractive, simpler, and you have a shorter time of construction. And because actually, the assets of the rooftop business are excellent assets for farm down, but we'll come back on that. So where are we heading? We have some ready-to-build assets in Italy, and some co-development and partnerships in Spain and in Eastern Europe.
Why going outside of France with such an appealing French market? Actually, as a CFO, I am convinced that we need to diversify the source of our growth. This is what we did and what we have been doing with Rubis Energy over the last thirty years by being present in forty countries, and it works. So we want to do the same thing, but in the solar, but focusing on less country to start. And also because the market abroad actually is quite appealing. Italy is starting to evolve exactly like France a few years ago.
Spain is very mature, but under-equipped in the north side of the country, and Eastern Europe is opening up and actually needs to transition away from the fossil production of electricity, and solar is our best option. That's why we target 15% of our revenues outside of our secured portfolio, outside of France, and 2% in the rooftop business. What does it mean in terms of numbers? Gonna tell you a lot of information. 2024 consolidated EBITDA will amount to 20 million EUR.
EBITDA generated by the assets in operations, that's what we call the power EBITDA, will be above 35 million EUR. The secured portfolio that you see on the top will amount to one gigawatt. What's the secured portfolio? The secured portfolio, it includes the assets in operation, the assets under construction, and the ready-to-build assets. The ready-to-build, it means that you've got all the permits, and you obt ain a date for the connection to the grid. Why should it matter to you, the secured portfolio?
Because this is what will generate an EBITDA in two to three years. If we stop all developments today, we will generate 75-80 million EUR of secured EBITDA. Historically, 100% of the secured portfolio has been put in operation, so that's why we call it secured, and it has a lot of value today that you don't see in the 2024 numbers. And we're not gonna stop here, actually. Look at 2027. We are aiming 2.5 gigawatts of secured portfolio.
It will represent 150-200 million EUR of secured EBITDA in two to three years, meaning two to three years later. And that, again, if we stop all developments in 2027, this is what we're gonna have. The power EBITDA will be above 80 million EUR, and the consolidated EBITDA will contribute to 50-55 million EUR. So you're gonna ask me, why such a difference between the consolidated EBITDA and the power EBITDA?
Let me tell you to build the secured portfolio, you need to develop your pipeline, and you need a development team in charge of originations, permits, impact studies, and it has a cost. And this cost is called. We're gonna call it DevEx, development expenditures. You cannot capitalize 100% of those development expenditures because you will not succeed 100% of the time.
That's why you have this difference between the consolidated EBITDA and the power EBITDA. But in 2027, those costs, they will be partially financed by farm-down operations. That will represent 10% of the consolidated EBITDA. What's a farm-down? A farm-down, this is a partial or the full sale of assets in operations or ready to be built when they reach their maximum value.
So when it becomes certain, it has the most value. And a lot of insurance companies and investors and financial investors love those kind of assets. So let's have a quick look at the cycle of the development of the assets to understand. You have two phases, one on the left, which goes from the early stage to the construction, and it lasts seven years. On the right, this is when the asset is in operation.
It lasts 30 years, and it's acting a bit like a bond with very predictable cash flow. So you need seven years to build a thirty-year bond equivalence. So what will happen during the seven years? You will finance, secure land, get permits, negotiate with mayors, unions, environmentalists, and during this period, you're gonna build the pipe for tomorrow's EBITDA.
And during the seven years period, actually, the NPV that you see here on the blue curve gonna increase with the time, and its value will develop as you progress in building this pipe, reaching its peak at the ready-to-build level. The Photosol team will explain you all of that in more details. So let me please welcome the team. Happy to have David, Robin, and Guillaume. Thank you, guys.
Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Clarisse. Thank you, Marc, for giving me the floor. Now, I'm going to be talking to you mainly about where Photosol stands and why our company is in the ideal spot to be able to make the most of this exponential growth that Marc and Clarisse have talked about. I, myself, is one of the co-founder of Photosol, so I will probably talk a little bit about it from the very beginning.
I'll talk about our strategy. I'll talk about the way in which we evolved and developed our company. First of all, I'd like to talk to you about the women and men who make up the Photosol team and talk to you about their commitment. David and I had set up Photosol some years ago, and we thought and were convinced that that we were going to have a large market for several years, and that this market made it possible for small, young companies that were innovative and dynamic to be able to make an impact.
And we believed that we could be good competitors with EDF and Engie and these very large companies. It was because we believed in this, that Benoit Farina, who is our CEO, Alix Lajoie, who is the deputy CEO, Antoine Dubos, who is our development director, and others joined us then. As of 2015 and 2016, we recruited very good managers, Thomas Aubagnac, who's the deputy CEO, Virginie Petit, Guillaume Thrierr, who is the head of financing and investments in 2023.
I haven't mentioned everybody, because in any case, you're going to have an opportunity to meet many of them this afternoon in our workshops. But the idea I think that you have to keep in your mind is that Photosol is run and managed by a very experienced team. Every individual has at least 15 years of experience in this area, and we've been working together for at least 10 years.
Over this time, obviously, we've added to our team since 2022. For example, Rubis joined Photosol, so we went from 90 people at the end of 2021 to more than 250 as we stand today. So we recruited large teams, most of them were development teams, almost 100 people, and also new sectors such as roofs and international markets.
I'll be brief and explain that as of 2009, we wanted and we planned that we wanted to go beyond being mere developers. We were absolutely sure that there were two areas where we could really add value. First of all, developing large ground systems, rather than having small rooftop systems, and secondly, having long-term held assets, and it was with that in view that we decided to build up our structures brick by brick, and we started off by working firstly on the development side of things.
Now, David will give you more details about this, but I'll be brief. What I mean when we talk about development is to secure land, carry out different sorts of studies which are environmental, on fauna, flora, on all sorts of things that you might come across. It also means contacting different authorities to get the right sort of permits. It's a very long process.
Sometimes you need about two or three years to get a construction permit, so it's a long period, but it's well planned, and it is well-paced. There are different stages, and you go through those stages at a set pace. For example, our first project, which was in Sarrazac, in the Lot, where we started the development in 2008 . We got the permit in 2010, and we set it up in 2014, and it was running, started operations in 2014.
Now, the second area that we are working on is finance. This is a capital-intensive sector, and usually it is through loans and debt. It's important for us to be able to fund these projects, have structured financing, and also to have the right sort of robust financial and fiscal balance, that is, to have as little equity as possible. Usually, bankers are in the same approach, have the same approach as us.
They want to maximize the loans, and we want to minimize our equity. The third point is construction. We're talking about industrial size projects. You'll see some photographs later on, and we'll hand them around. These are projects that cover hundreds and hundreds of hectares. Just to give you an example, for example, one football pitch is approximately a hectare, and many of our projects are over 60 hectares or 70 hectares.
You need to have hundreds of people to actually build the structures. We ourselves are not installers or builders. We don't have those sort of facilities, and so we are not those who actually provide electrical products or modules. That's not what we do. What we do in the construction area is that we buy volumes for our own projects.
We negotiate contracts for several hundreds of megawatts for our own pipeline. We have some systems of engineering to get the best performances, to be able to question our builders on the processes and the costs. We also have very detailed reviews concerning health and safety, and also the best risk management. We carry out all that research, and we give a contract for approximately 10 or 15 years to the right person. We operate and maintain operations and maintenance.
This is something that we started doing in 2013 or 2014 for our own projects. We deal with preventive operations, but also curative, that is, if there's any breakdowns, we manage that. We also manage spare parts, performances, and any deterioration in equipment, so obviously there's an economic reason for this, which is obvious, because this means that we don't have to call in third parties, and it's cheaper, but also we optimize the use of the power station over a longer period of time, or the structure over a longer period of time, and also what we're planning to do is to develop these sort of services for third parties, so to conclude on this section, which is obviously extremely important, our in-house revenues come from the sale of electricity.
It's not from building the structures or pipelines. It is by selling electricity. That is where our revenues come from. And actually putting together all these different métiers or professions allows us to create value at each stage: development, construction, operations, and later on as well when we get to the implementation.
So this creates value. We can be more competitive as a result when we respond to bids, PPA or the CRE, but also it allows us to be self-sufficient. And this is very important for us. We are independent. We are self-sufficient. We do not need third-party investors putting their funds in. We are also self-sufficient from other investors who may be there to boost our growth through investment.
This is really important because this allows us to avoid all the serious holdbacks and limitations during development phases. Just to give you an illustration of what I mean, here are three cases. One is when I'm going to be citing regulations in the French market concerning buyback tariffs. Secondly, a regulatory issue concerning European markets, concerning supplies.
And third one, which is economic and financial, and which is worldwide, which has affected the world over, and I'll talk about that later on. But anyway, the first one concerns French regulatory issues, and this goes back to December 2010. The government decided that photovoltaic sectors were going to be completely put on hold. This was a disaster.
90-odd or 900-odd companies were going to go into total collapse. And this is that it was only 18 months in which they had to actually fix their tariffs, and those who didn't have those tariffs didn't have any regulatory phase for the next 2 years. So 90% of all those on that market went bankrupt. Investors that didn't have projects left France because they thought it was easier elsewhere.
There was no point remaining in France. Developers who didn't have any financing sold their projects off cheap and left the market. And there were just a few who remained, who were developers and investors, who managed to get through this bleak period, and that was Photosol. One of them was Photosol. We had some funds.
We bought cheap projects or projects that were being sold off cheaply. We bought the construction permits, etcetera, in the deadlines that had been set. There was no funding that was available. We used our own equity. We followed our authorities with our own projects. When the regulations changed two years later, and when it was possible to once again have these special tariffs established, we were ready, and we could get onto the market.
It was because we were all these three things at the same time, that is a developer, a funder, and financier, and an operator, that we managed to get through this terrible period. Second point concerns supplies, and this is May 2013 . The EU set up customs tariffs to fight against huge imports, imports from China.
80 or 90% of all the European projects used Chinese modules. So there were these anti-dumping rules, and so suddenly, none of these structures were available in Europe, and we had to build 50 megawatts, which was a lot, in a very short period. So we went to the United States, and we got in touch with First Solar to come back to France, and to Europe, and to work with us on this particular project.
First Solar was persuaded, first of all, by our position on the market, and this is because its technology was very different. It was a thin-film roof that was a very different structure. We explained that we were investing, that we were not getting funds from anywhere else, and we had our own funds, and we had three hundred mega that were being developed, and First Solar could actually come back onto the French and European market through our pipeline.
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Okay, apologies for the technical issues. We should be back on board here. So we have electricity generation, about 500 megawatts, 520 megawatts secured. So secured is all of this, but we have the ready-to-build layers that are ready to go. Our pipeline is 5.2 gigawatts, so that is in between the initial project and the authorization.
And then we have a further 3.6 gigawatts before that. So what should you understand from this pipeline? First of all, first lesson, first reading, is that the portfolio is growing. When Rubis bought into Photosol a little bit before that, we were less than 300 megawatts in operation. Now we're at 460 megawatts, so more than 50% increase in growth in running operations.
The pipeline, the development pipeline, so that we have before the ready-to-build stage, has been multiplied by two. We were at 2.5, and now we're at 5.2 gigawatts. And we've also been able to go from 1 gigawatt per year to 2.6 gigawatts in the advanced development.
This goes to show the significant development that we've experienced over the last years, and Guillaume will be coming back to that in a minute. Second lesson is the outlook. Clear and ambitious outlook for our future. It takes two to three years for a project to get into the top of the funnel here, the development phase, to trickle all the way down to secured. That means authorizations that you need to get from authorities.
I can see one of my colleagues nodding here about how long it takes. It's give or take that. Now, there are outliers, but generally, a product that comes in here in the early stage is about 40% likely to become secured. And as Marc said, generally, once it's secured, 100% of them eventually reach operation. So based on the probability figures and based on our pipeline, we believe that by 2027, we will be looking at about 2.5 gigawatts of secured projects with give or take, 1 gigawatt in operation.
Now, I say give or take, that's not really something you want to hear a CFO saying, but it depends on, dates of being plugged into the grid and that kind of thing. Second important takeaway, there's an imbalance between revenue right here and costs here. Again, we have that funnel shape.
We've got 460 megawatts in operation generating revenue, and then we've got 6-7 gigawatts that are cost leaders. And the costs go up, the higher you are in the funnel until you get to the very bottom. It's important to keep these metrics in mind. We're talking about a one to 15 ratio between capacity that's generating revenue and capacity that's a cost lead.
That also shows the growth that we've had over the last years and the ambitious targets that Photosol has set. Fourth takeaway, it's not because we have low revenue versus cost that the portfolio doesn't have any value. A project that gets to the secured stage will generate about EUR 200,000 per megawatt. So after you pay back the debt, after you pay back now all of the costs related.
We're talking discounted cash flow calculation here, but on a kind of back of an envelope calculation, that's about where you're at. As you get down the funnel, you get closer to that 200,000 per megawatt. It's not because they're not generating cash now that they don't have any value now. They generate negative EBITDA, but their value is going up, and Guillaume will be coming back to that in a minute.
Now, once the projects are secure. There we go. Next slide. Once our projects have been approved, they've got the hookup date to the grid, and they've got the building approval, we run through two major systems. There are corporate PPAs, and there's the public CRE project. The CRE system is the national system.
We get a 20-year contract, which is set in stone for 20 years. PPAs, corporate PPAs are B2B, 10 to 20 year contracts, generally 15-year contracts, often a fixed cost plus inflation, but sometimes the contracts differ. In both cases, we have good visibility of the revenue, which is a statistically identifiable revenue based on the costs.
Costs account for about 20% of revenue, and they're all based in contracts as well. You have a lease contract for 2030 , 40 maybe sometimes even more years than that. You then have an O&M contract. You have an insurance contract, so if something gets broken, if something breaks on its own, taxes as well. Those get factored in. And then under EBITDA, you have financial costs that come from the financing of the project itself.
We'll come back to that, and these are all fixed rates for the entire length of the contract. Again, highly visible and predictable. We've set targets for 2027 for the secured projects you can see on the screen. That's about EUR 1 billion in CapEx between now and then. How do we fund that?
In France, thanks to the high amount of future visibility that we have, we can set up funding schemes without any liability for the shareholders. Now, that doesn't mean that we're not going to pay back the debt, but it means that the lender, so the banker, is so confident that the loan will be paid back, that they don't need any further guarantees beyond the content of the project itself. Some characteristics of these systems, and we have a workshop on that this afternoon as well.
We're talking about contracts that are 20-23 years in length, so sometimes even beyond the purchase contract. 80%-90% rates, 130-150 basis points. Now, people say this is a crime and it's theft, but honestly, 130-150 basis points isn't that bad. Then you've got a value of the land, you've got value of the equipment, and of course, none of this gives liability to the shareholder.
It used to be much less generous. Maturity dates used to be 15 years, rates used to be higher, 250 basis points. But over time, the profession, and by profession, I mean bankers, bankers became more trustful of the asset, and there was more competition, so the financing conditions improved. It ended up showing the solidity of the project and, remember that the lender puts up 80%-90% of the funds for this type of project at this point.
Now, once the project has been developed, it's been built, you might think, "All right, it's running. Let's just wait for the money to come in." But it's much more complicated than that. There are ways to create value, and there are ways to create synergies and optimizations even beyond then. So as a reminder, we create a lot of value up front. We're not a multi-contractor, so we save 10-15% on CapEx.
The O&M margin, very reliable over the operating time of the asset. But once it's operating, there are also ways to find added value, and I'll be coming back to those in a minute. Refinancing, for example, I was saying a few moments ago that our first financing contracts didn't have such good margins and were shorter maturities. Every 18 months, so a year and a half to two years, we undergo refinancing of our assets.
We increase maturities, we draw down margins, we pool projects within portfolios so that we can diversify. We include projects that have PPAs. We mix up some older projects with track records with some newer ones. So we are regularly able to refinance, to draw out equity and to increase value. Second optimization, the PPAs themselves. For a number of years now, we have been pulling out of some of the public contracts that had lower margins, but enough for us to operate, and to draw out of those, to sign PPAs, to increase contract maturity and to increase our rates.
David will be talking about some of the PPAs that we've been able to sign recently. Third way we can create value, and this is more industrial, this is known as repowering. Our operating portfolio is something that I see as fertile ground for future development. In the last years, because of the low efficiency of modules, we needed a lot of land to generate power because the modules weren't that good, and also we had power limitations, so we had unused land, and David will be explaining that later.
Land is the key to all of that. That Photosol's value is based on land. So projects that have too much land for the power that they're generating can be repowered. That means adding power into our projects. Let me give you an example.
In the Landes region, in France, we have fifty-five megawatts across a couple of communes, and studies show us, and we've in fact applied for this, that we could go from fifty-five to a hundred and fifty-five megawatts without having to increase the land occupied by the project, although there would be some changes that need to be made, some renegotiations and some adjustment. Another example would be the one in Saint-Lazare
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Finally, we have farm down. So this is how we pull out of the assets, ready to build or operational. We might have a minority stake, a majority stake. It depends on who we're working with. They might be strategic partners or passive partners. It might depend on whether we want to keep our contract with the public sector or not, but in any case, we are working on our farm down policy for our assets.
In a nutshell, Photosol right now has a number of assets in hand to drive growth. We have a highly experienced team. We have a large pipeline. We have good targets for 2027 , and I'd now like to give the floor to Guillaume, who's going to tell you just what these targets mean for our costs and revenues.
Thank you, Robin. Let me now walk you through a little bit of how the development timeline impacts our financial trajectory. As Robin mentioned, success takes time, and infrastructure is a long-term business. Before our assets enter into operation, they will go through a cycle which lasts around seven years, so four years of development and three years of execution. If we focus first on development, it's very important for you to understand that we are not interested in volume for the sake of it.
We're not incentivized to create volume for the sake of it. We're focused on value creation from the very beginning, which means that when we have a project enter into our pipeline, we will screen it and vet it according to several criteria to maximize the chances of success and guarantee its profitability.
Those criteria include, of course, solar resource, the quality and the critical size of a plot of land, the competitiveness of the rent, the grid availability and its proximity, engineering complexity, environmental constraints, and any other constraints which might hinder the ability to develop a project. During the execution phase, which takes place post-permitting, this phase is mainly limited by the availability of the grid, which today in France it takes about three years for us to interconnect our projects, whereas the construction itself only lasts about one year.
So we set everything in motion to make sure we deliver the projects by that date. All these topics will be addressed in great details this afternoon with Thomas Aubagnac, Deputy CEO, and Antoine Dubos, Head of Development, to go through all of this. So development is complex, but it's a process. Our success is our ability, at any point in time, to manage hundreds of different projects at various stages of development.
From the start, meaning signature of an option for lease, all the way to permitting, we have a historical track record of around 40% of projects which ultimately reach the ready-to-build status. Development is not a one-time bet. You don't place all your money in on day one on a project and then hope for a return 40% of the time, four years later.
You will go through the process of preliminary studies and the permitting, which means you will incur DevEx over time. Over time, the chances of success will increase, thereby limiting the amounts that we're spending at risk. The single most important step in this whole process is when we reach ready to build and when a project enters our secured portfolio, which means a project has received all the authorizations for its construction and secured the grid. From then on, all the projects we've developed ultimately reach COD, and that is when they crystallize most of their value.
At that point in time, even though these assets are not yet generating EBITDA, they're a little over halfway there in terms of time. There already is a market value for them, typically four to five times what we've spent to achieve that. You have to remember that development is a very profitable component of our business. Taking a step back, and Marc has shown you this before, but I'd like to emphasize a couple of messages.
Development takes time, but during these four years of development, we typically incur about only 10% of the cost of actually building a project, which is obviously relatively limited. Once a project is secured, it will stop incurring any cost until we start construction, at which point all internal costs and CapEx to build the plant are capitalized and have no impact on our P&L. And again, as we mentioned, and I'll be co-chairing a workshop with Benoit Farine this afternoon, to walk you through how we finance this 90+% with debt.
So to recap, we screen our portfolio early to maximize our chances of success and guarantee a project's profitability. We spend money over time, thereby limiting the amounts that we're placing at risk, and the overall money that we're spending is relatively inexpensive. Inexpensive compared to the overall cost of the project, inexpensive compared to the future EBITDA generation of an asset.
Coincidentally, the amount we spent over the life of the development is roughly about the same as one year of EBITDA generation for that project, and that EBITDA generation will be available to us for 30-plus years. And again, this development cost is relatively inexpensive when compared to the market value of a permit, which is multiple times what we've spent to get to that point.
Focusing on our financial trajectory and how this process translates into some numbers and the momentum that we're in, I wanna go back to a few definitions. Power EBITDA is the EBITDA from the aggregation of all of our power plants, the four hundred and sixty megawatts that Robin and a few others have mentioned before. Each new project that comes into operation contributes incrementally to that power EBITDA for 30-plus years.
It's the beauty of this stable business model, which we'll go back to in great detail this afternoon. It's very important to understand this, basically, the IPP, independent power producer component of our business. But to grow this power EBITDA, of course, we need to spend money to develop our pipeline and create new capacity. We spend money on personnel expenses, development costs, studies, and so on.
DevEx is effectively the bridge between what you're seeing today in our consolidated EBITDA and what our power plants are generating. You have to understand that, one, power EBITDA is constantly growing, and each new project is an incremental brick, repeating it as many times so that you remember this. Power EBITDA is only going up, and sharply up, whereas DevEx is a function of how intensive is our development effort.
And at the moment, given the size of our pipeline, it's very expensive, but this DevEx, over time, will stabilize. So midterm, consolidated EBITDA trajectory is very clear and demonstrates strong momentum, but today, our acceleration and the size of our pipeline, 10-15 times our installed capacity, means that for the time being, our consolidated trajectory has not been the right measure of this strong momentum. Between 2022 and 2024, our teams have grown from less than 100 people to 250 today.
Our pipeline has more than doubled to 5.2 gigawatt, and we've basically dimensioned the French platform to fully capture the fantastic market that is France. Today, the French platform is somewhat mature, and the DevEx in France will stabilize to the current run rate. In the next couple of years, in between now and 2027, we will be going through a second development cycle to expand our international platform.
This will lead to another round of increase in our DevEx, but ultimately by 2026, 2027, again, this component of our development business will have reached a steady run rate. Once our platform is mature, our development platform is mature, it means that any new asset coming into operation will fully translate into growth in our consolidated EBITDA. Consolidated EBITDA today is not the right metric to measure our outstanding momentum, and to be provocative, growth in our DevEx today is a healthy sign that we're there to capture the development cycle and not miss the window of opportunity. Thank you very much. I'll leave the floor to David to walk you through our strategic roadmap. ...
[Foreign Language]
Hello, everybody. I'm going to speak French again. We've got interpreters. So now can you hear me on this? Can you hear me now? Okay, great.
So I'm going to be talking to you about our strategic plan, which is a roadmap. We've talked about it obviously earlier on, but I'll try to give you a few more details about it. There are two main axes. So first of all, accelerating and reinforcing our position in our core activities, and secondly, developing strategic areas, geographically and as far as markets are concerned.
As Guillaume said, these two areas are actually developing high investments, and this is going to lead to a bit in a few years' time. But also, as of today, gains value, and these values are based on the strategic approach that we had from the very beginning, which is cautious and ambitious.
Obviously, we're ambitious because we have a very clear-cut ambition to hugely increase volume and our market shares to become leaders in all the different segments that we've been talking about. But we're also cautious because obviously we're careful to make sure that growth is profitable, that we are not losing out on profitability in any way. So Guillaume explained this at each stage.
This adds value to the projects that we are building. Let's look at strategic axis number one, and that is accelerating our core business, and that is the large ground-built solar systems in France.
I will go into more details about this later on, but we are a real competitive advantage on many of these. First of all, it secures our land ownership. Secondly, we get our administrative paperwork sorted out faster, we can have a link up to the grid faster, and also we can get a good sale price for the electricity.
So first, let's look at land. Obviously, we have to sign a lease, and to give you an idea of what this means, one hectare represents one megawatt, but it also means that obviously, what is key for us is land, and we use a lot of land. Now, in France, this is obviously quite difficult because in the past we've always built on wasteland or unused land, poor land, poor quality land, and there are not that many of them around.
So we feel that we've used up the stock of that sort of land that was available. So the solution is what we have called agrivoltaism, and that means that we'll be developing our solar farms on farmland. There are two advantages: First of all, as far as volume is concerned, there's a lot of farmland around. In fact, many in France, at least on the scale that we want, or at least for the sort of developments we want.
If you do quick calculations, if you have, if you want to achieve your full 100% goals in the future on farmland, we would still only use 0.03% of all farmland available in France. So this means that we have a lot of additional land, which is available. Secondly, Photosol is a specialist in this area.
We were one of the first companies to actually believed in developing these sorts of projects, as of 2008 . Robin spoke about this. We started off, by having these sort of projects that were dual, starting off in 2013 . So many of them were on farmland. We have some 10 years of experience, and we know how it works in situ.
So we know that if we are actually carrying out an analysis, if we look at the laws that are being passed. In fact, our land has been used in different sorts of studies that have been carried out by the government, which has proven that it is possible to continue increasing our farm yield, even once the panels have been set up.
So I just wanted to show you that this really is a very good way of developing solar power in France and will represent a huge extra input to energy. Photosol has eight people working exclusively on this. Soon, there will be twelve, and this is one of the reasons why we have increased our project portfolio that was presented to you by Robin earlier on, and that is because of this additional farmland that will be used.
Secondly, what's really important is getting all the paperwork sorted. Now, obviously, once we've found the land, we have to get all the different permits. Here once again, it's very important to really understand how local markets and governments and local rules. This is why Photosol works with regional teams all over France, so they really understand the subjects. They also understand the people of the area, so how open they are to these sort of new projects.
We also have good links with local representatives, local authorities, and in this way, we can actually get our permits and paperwork sorted more quickly. Robin talked about this as well. We have approximately a hundred people who are working in our development team, and we can say that we really have a team which is extremely well-versed in this subject.
We will talk about this later on, and for the six-- past 16 years, people have been working on developing permits and getting authorizations, so they know exactly how to present their case and get their actual paperwork sorted. So this means that things have speeded up.
In fact, if you want to compare how we've been managing in the last two or three years, you can see that we've been getting three times more permits, and we've actually obtained our administrative paperwork and authorizations almost five times faster and in number. So this is really good news for all of us. It's because of the Photosol teams, but it's also because the rules in France have been simplified in the past few years.
There's a new law, which is called the APER Law, which was voted early 2023, and which is to speed up alternative sources of energy. But that's not the only reason. The whole point of this law is to make sure that things are easier for people to get their laws, their paperwork sorted.
And also, it's also possible now to appeal for support if your permit is not being granted in sufficient time. And also, the goals in France in their multi-annual energy programs have changed and have, as I said, we should get a hundred megawatts from renewables by 2035 . And so here, once again, there is a real ambition which has been fixed by the French government, and we fit into that quite nicely.
The third point is the connection to the grid. Now, let me just talk about this a little more. I think you're probably most interested in this. A lot of people have been talking about this a great deal. People have been talking about the fact that solar energy and other alternative energies find it very difficult to hook up to the grid, so in real time, this leads to delays.
People have talked about negative hours, that it's difficult to balance it out. Now, we've been working on this for the last 15 or 16 years, and we've always heard the same sort of thing, and I think, that this actually represents an opportunity because it will give us a real, a real competitive edge, and also, it allows us to say that we have a real, competitive edge. On the one hand, we have been able to identify the French areas, where these difficulties do not exist, and secondly, we can find zones, where we can actually develop...
We can actually plan three or four, five years ahead, if there are problems concerning connecting to the grid. So this gives us a competitive edge as well. So in areas where it is difficult to connect to the grid, we can plan ahead by three or four, five years, and we have also been able to identify areas where it's easy to connect to the grid. Now, the fact that solar energy is not always fully available because there is an imbalance between supply and demand.
However, we can correct that because what is important is to get as much as the electricity, which is actually produced in the afternoon, and use it during the peak periods, evenings, and mornings, and so there are storage solutions now, which are available. Thanks to these storage solutions, it's possible to make these approaches a little more profitable. We've been working on storage.
There is a special team that has managed to get permits for 50 megawatts storage in France, mainland France and overseas France, for the years ahead. This means that we will be able to solve this problem of the balance between supply and demand fairly soon. The last point is the rate, the tariff. Robin explained this earlier on. There are two ways of doing this, CRE and PPA. I won't go into all the details about the CRE tenders and PPA. I think all of this.
Doesn't have a huge impact on us, because we, once we've had the construction permit and we've got the connection to the grid, 100% of our projects are covered by the grids. And if you look at the success rates, you can see that there have been tender offers since 2018, and you can see that we have 100% success of the projects that are presented to the CRE.
Last week, Photosol was declared as being one of the top-ranking companies to receive favorable conditions from the CRE. For example, there are some who are ahead of us, such as EDF, but Total and others are way behind. We have a variable rate, depending on the call for tenders, but we follow the curve of costs. So this means that we have a margin, which is probably the same over time, and at the same time, we have volumes that increase over time.
So 1.8 megawatts in 2022, 3 in 2023, and if we were to plan ahead to achieve our new government goals, it would be 6 gigawatts per year. But that's not the only way in which we can actually enhance the projects. The second area is through PPA. We've talked about this in recent years. It exists in other parts of the world, but it's only in the last three or four years that the PPA market has really increased and become more important.
First of all, because of the war in Ukraine, which led to supply problems and costs going up, but also it has not gone away since, and this is because companies and also large energy consumers have realized that their own competition could be affected by fluctuations in supplies. So I think there's been a shift in the way of thinking of these large companies, and therefore, today, increasingly, people are trying to find at least a long-term, secure rate for long term, for a longer period, either coming from renewable energy or others, and this is done on a negotiated contract basis.
So this means that we have the possibility to be free, as we are not a state company, to be free to choose the right option which enables us to supply the best costed energy. And therefore we actually do this so that we can actually. We can say that the last three contracts were PPA that we have signed, and one of the megawatts that has been concerned about these PPAs had actually been the winner of the CRE bid. And in fact the costs that had been proposed by the industrialist was actually higher than what the winning bid got.
Now, I've spent a lot of time talking to you about France, and this is because it's our main market, and it will continue to be so for the few years ahead. But to sum up, what I wanted to say about the French market is that we are now at a turning point and a very key moment concerning solar energy, solar energy, and this is because we have very strong support from the French government, and secondly, because we have solar energy, which is now getting to a extremely competitive position. It is one of the least costly and the most competitive.
So I think the planets are well aligned, and I think Photosol is in the right place because we can actually really gain from these two factors. We have invested a great deal in the area, and therefore, we will have been investing in increasing our volumes, and we will be able to tap into this market, which has a high added value. As I have said, we have been cautious as well, and therefore, we are being cautious by making sure that the investment effects are not really great and make sure that performance is always maintained at the top level.
The second area that I wanted to talk about, we talked about France earlier on, which is our core market, but now let me talk about diversification in other areas. First of all, creating a group of small modules, these would be small producers that would be between 100 kilowatt and 3 megawatts. This is something that we didn't actually work with, but in fact this was a market which was used by C&I . But the reason Mobexi , and Unify and they are the ones who actually work on rooftop modules.
Now, this is something which is also growing a great deal, first of all, because of costs, and also because of a specific project that the French government had that is giving a better price, 50%-100% advantage compared to the ground modules or modules that are actually placed on the ground. And often this is on the top of parking lots, and there are advantages that people can actually get from using this.
And secondly, there are also real synergies within Photosol, and we realized that it's quite useful for us to have this full range going from rooftops, therefore, a small scale to much larger standalone volumes. And thirdly, this is an area where we have a lot of teamwork that we've carried out, particularly in the Caribbean and in the Réunion Island.
We've been working with our teams, particularly there, and also from a financial point of view, it's interesting. We talked about looking at the long term, and therefore, this on the contrary deals with short-term effects because you get the permit quite quickly, you can build quite quickly, and this means that you can create EBITDA much faster and can get better opportunities.
[Foreign Language] So, where are we at after the launch of this small subsidiary? And as you saw in the figures earlier, we're still talking about a relatively small size, but with strong growth, with a 5X increase in the number of ready-to-build projects over two years, 80 megawatts in development, so a very strong growth driver for Photosol.
Second diversification method is geographical. We discussed this a little bit earlier in the presentation. One of the main aims of this movement to geographical diversification is to reduce risk. That would be risk related to almost pure exposure to the French market. The idea being here to develop a second leg on our body, outside the one that's in France, roughly the same size, but based in new regions around Europe, mainly.
We would expect similar development trajectories on this second leg as for France, but with differences in the market that we're trying to look at. The first one is that the maturity level may be different from France. There are markets where the maturity level is similar to France, such as Italy. Now, Italy is a country for which we can leverage all of the work that we've already done in France when it comes to development, because land value in Italy is absolutely key to our business proposal, and Italy has set up regulation on farmland photovoltaic plants.
We want to develop a local subsidiary with people in the field, so local staff working on developing a project pipeline, just as we have in France, although there will be some strategic acquisitions, such as the one we undertook a couple of months ago, for an 80-100 megawatt portfolio that will then ramp up our development and further anchor us locally.
For a market like Italy, which is similar in maturity to France, we're looking for profitability similar to that as we have in France. Second type of market is a more mature market. Spain is the example of this, a more mature solar market than in France. The aim here is to work with local partners. This means that we would lower our exposure, and we'd be able to pay for development along certain milestones rather than more upfront.
You might ask why we're looking at Spain, despite the fact that it's a market that is far more mature than in France and already has a lot of players. Well, it's the best market in Europe, is the first reason. This is where we have the most innovation. This is where we have the most sun. Quite simply, this is where we have the most available land. There is amazing governmental support to the solar industry in Spain as well, because Spain wants to turn the solar industry into an asset for their industry, so it's a good market.
However, the approach to a market like this one is going to be very different. You're not going to butt heads with the players with giga projects in Andalusia. We've identified a subsegment of the market that was kind of forgotten or maybe not considered by the major players, 5- to 50-megawatt projects on the medium voltage network in regions that are a little bit behind some of the others, such as Catalonia, and that's great because that's the kind of project that we're good at already.
Sure, the profitability of these projects are a little bit lower, but these are quick to develop. There is still capacity in the grid to accept it, and it's good in a mature market like Spain. Now, we're not here to fight for the gigawatt projects in the center of Spain. We're here to pick up the small growth drivers in the periphery. Third type of market, again, this is a less mature market than France. This is Eastern Europe.
The aim, again, is to work with local partners who would develop and co-develop, the local projects. Now, why we're looking at these projects is because these projects have good fundamentals. So high energy prices, high reliance on Russian oil and gas, strong political will, because they're members of the European Union, to achieve their targets for renewable usage.
A reliable grid, a banking system that is set up and is already investing in renewables, and also a lot of land available to buy. That's what we think of Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Romania at the moment, which are the countries that are ahead of the curve in that region right now. The advantage of this is that the costs are lower, with very short development times, and all of this means that we can achieve higher profitability figures than in France, Italy, and more so for Spain.
Finally, the last part of our diversification strategy, and this is kind of a follow-up that goes hand in hand with what we've already discussed, and Robin already touched on it. I am, of course, referring to the optimization of our assets. In our DNA, since we created Photosol, we have always wanted to keep our assets.
We don't want to sell them once they're ready to build, or we don't want to sell them once they're operating, because we believe that it doesn't represent the full value of the projects, and that we could get more out of them by keeping them over time. Let me give you a clear example. When we kicked off this project, this company, 16, 17 years ago, most of the lease contracts were for 20 years, which was the same length as the PPAs.
Nowadays, you won't find any lease for less than 40 years. That's basically the rule in the market, and we're starting to see land being secured for 50, 60, 100 years because most of the players in the sector believe that there is intrinsic value in the project based on where they are physically. So the land value and the position related to the grid. In the shorter term.
Now, don't worry, I'm not here to talk about the value proposition for 90 years. It's a bit further out, but in the very short term, we have optimization of the value of assets that we have in our portfolio, and that goes through what is known as repowering. Robin mentioned this earlier.
Repowering means replacing part or all of the equipment for an operating plant to, first of all, increase capacity, so the number of megawatts per square meter or whatever, and also the overall performance of the project through higher performance photovoltaic cells, but also overcoming administrative constraints that we would have had to deal with 10 years ago, but we don't need to do any more.
The first one we did was in Martinique. At the time, this was an interesting repowering project because it was a panel guarantee project. So this is a project where the performance of the panels was lower than what was guaranteed by the supplier.
So we replaced all of the modules with no CapEx, with an increase in installed capacity of 10%, and also an increase in performance that was even higher than that because the panels were even better. Without any CapEx, we were able to recreate value on a site that had been around for six or seven years already, thanks to repowering.
That was our first example, but right now we can do even better because the work that we're doing on our first photovoltaic, 75, megawatt capacity repowering project, is that we can multiply capacity by two or three X, going from 75 megawatts to about 200 megawatts on seven or eight projects, mainly in the southeast of France. This repowering project is going to go hand in hand with increase in performance for all the reasons that I just explained, better performance panels.
The panels that we're installing today see an annual drop-off of power, much lower than what we had for the first panels we installed. And the initial price is not put back on the table for the first tranche. All we have to do is rework our rates for the extra megawatts, and the success rate is basically 100% because the environmental and ecological concerns are basically nonexistent now.
You already had a solar plant. You're building a better plant on the same area, so authorizations are much easier to obtain. So 75 megawatts that are going to become 200 megawatts. We're currently looking at the building permits for that.
But basically, all of our portfolio at Photosol could be repowered in the coming years, and the repowered projects that we're doing now might even be repowered again in 5 to 10 years. So for a solar market where technological advances are significant and everything has changed every year for the last 15 years, every year we get better panels.
The fact that we hold these assets and the fact that we can do these repowering projects has a lot of value for us. Second, optimization driver. This is more financially in nature. Now, I just kind of discussed a technical way that we can optimize. Now, we've got a financial way that we can optimize. And again, Robin Uccelli touched on this earlier.
Throughout our history at Photosol, 100% of our projects that we have financed and that we operate ended up being refinanced in some way during their lifespan. A way that we do this is to mix projects up at different rates, at different maturities, different locations, so that we can better optimize the financing. As Robin said earlier, that reduces the cost of debt, it increases the maturity, it increases leverage.
The result for us means that we can increase profitability of projects that haven't fundamentally changed because they we haven't invested any more. There's no technical changes. But above all of that, we're able to reduce the equity share of the financing, get that money out, and then self-finance development instead. This financial engineering is on the screen behind me.
This is the Mido portfolio, so we have bundling, and also this is the opportunity for us to adjust things for the new business environment, such as PPAs. Thanks to this refinancing, we were able to include projects outside of the CRE tenders. So we ended up breaking out of the CRE tender and reselling that contract as a PPA.
But this goes to show that our energy management and our project financing departments have a lot that they can do right now to get as much value possible as we can out of the megawatts that we are producing right now, and they also have the opportunity to get more out of what we have, basically. This is going to require bundling energy sources. It's going to require storage from next year onwards, due to the projects that we're developing.
And finally, and I won't dwell on this because we've already discussed it, this financial engineering, this financial optimization, will also allow opportunistic farm-down projects that will then feed into our self-financing capacity and reduce the cost of capital for our project. And I'd like to give the floor back to Clarisse.
As earlier, we are at a crucial stage of development in for the solar market in France and in Europe. We are leveraging all this in a very favorable context, and so we have decided to accelerate our development to seize the best opportunities of land, financing, and contracts. In parallel, as we all explained before, we are pushing the diversification forward, both activities and geographies, in line with the current market conditions, as we did in our distribution business a few years ago.
This solar business addresses and anticipates the decline of fossil fuels in Europe, while providing the group's long-term growth driver. We create value and profitability through Photosol's integrated model, but also through asset optimization: repowering, refinancing, and optimizing the capital allocation through farm-down program. Photosol's value is growing through the development of its pipeline.
We have the means to finance this growth without relying on the market and with keeping an acceptable debt level in the long term. So Rubis is well positioned, is well positioned today for profitable growth, so we offer safe, reliable, sustainable, and affordable energy. Thank you very much for your attention. So I think now we are ready for questions. Marc?
Okay, can everyone hear me? Good, morning, Emmanuel Matot.
Thank you very much for the CMD. I have three questions. First of all, the plan is ambitious, I think it's fair to say. Based on my models, you'll be using more cash than what was expected when Photosol was bought. So can you confirm at this point that shareholders to Photosol will not have to cough up more money before the end of the project?
And if it was necessary to inject new money, how much? Second question, profitability at Photosol. We discussed EBITDA a lot with some new interesting indicators, such as power EBITDA. But there are some other items on a P&L. I'd like to know what EPS and net profit is.
Net profit was negative last year, as we're all very aware, 19 million EUR negative. In your development plan, what is the likelihood of a return to the black for Photosol? Also, for founders, because you are key people as part of this, you have been in Rubis for two years now.
So my question is, does this integration with Rubis meet your expectations? And are you expecting to stick around at the head of Photosol for coming years, at least, to the end of 2027? Thank you.
For the cash needs for Rubis Photosol, we were pretty clear about the structure and the financing of these projects. We're at between 80%-90% debt finance, the rest comes from equity, so the math is quite easy. What I can tell you at this point is that at the end of 2023, Photosol's shareholders had 35 million EUR for Rubis Photosol, sorry.
So you can do the math for the coming cash needs, especially as we also discussed how we can do discretionary farm down if we need to raise cash. On net profit, the financing structure of Rubis Photosol means that, of course, financial costs and D&A are weighing down the balance sheet, so net profit is negative, of course, for Photosol. However, things should be understood as part of a whole. Here we're talking net profit that is slightly in the red versus net profit group wide, which is anywhere between 250-300 million EUR.
This is an investment in the future that if it's not accretive in the coming years is still acceptable. The accretive nature of Photosol will come in question if we decide to ramp down Photosol at some point in the future. Let's understand things in their context of net profit of Photosol versus net profit for Rubis. Also, this doesn't alter the cash position that we discussed earlier.
Number one priority for the group that we've been doing for 35 years now is to pay out a dividend that goes up and to fund maintenance, development, and organic and external growth. As regards Photosol's profit and loss account, there's no significant impact on the group-wide P&L. The impact is minimal.
We've shown that it creates long-term value for the group as a whole, and for an energy group such as ours, it's our responsibility to have low-carbon, renewable solutions to offer our clients. This is something that we are wholly on board with. We're not going to be sitting around on this. There's investment that's going to need to be made, and to have a good strategy, you need visibility, time, and money.
And we had exactly the same strategy for Rubis Terminal a couple of years ago. The market might have already forgotten about that one. Nowadays, we have significant capital gains on the sale of Rubis Terminal, despite the significant investment that were made into Rubis Terminal at the time, and greenfield assets. So Photosol's value comes from pipeline development, from the quality of the teams, the experience of the teams, the diversification of demand, and long-term prospects.
Don't you respond to the third?
Let me answer the third question. Thank you for your question. Well, we see that, two years later, we are quite happy with what happened with Rubis, and, the question as to whether we're perfectly happy, two years on, yes, of course, and I think obviously the market is quite complex, but we've explained to you as best we can today, how we get the equity in place, but I think Clarisse talked about this in the introduction as well.
We fully understand the entrepreneurial nature of Rubis, and even if we're not on the same markets, not the same sizes, not the same markets. But what we liked, when we first met, and that was about three years ago, was the fact that there was a DNA match between us, and in fact, this can be translated or expressed in real trust that Rubis has shown towards us.
So, it was in keeping with our vision of two years ago. We said that the French market was going to become very important, that there were going to be many new projects, and Rubis is supporting us on this. I'd just like to say that we are obviously shareholders of Rubis Photosol. This is what Robin, Benoit, and myself, and many others, who are co-founders, wish to have. We wanted to keep our links with this company, despite the fact that there was a majority shareholder that was there.
As far as the operations are concerned, and I'm satisfied that you said that the founders were essential. It's true that Robin talked about this as well. In the last two or three years, we've talked about the real value of Photosol, and that is our teams. You're going to meet them this afternoon. You will see Guillaume, others, all the other managers Robin was mentioning, and the 250 people who are part of our company. And Antoine and I, of course, were in charge of development.
Initially, we used to go and contact town halls, farmers, and so on and so forth. But today, I'm impressed by the 100 people who do this for us, and who are much better than we are. Obviously, we will work closely, but we can say that it's the teams that are really the key source of our success.
[Foreign Language]
Hello, Mourad Lahmidi from BNP Paribas.
I had three questions. The first is on the payback. Can you give us an idea on what the time is before you can get returns on your projects? Are there projects that have fully be amortized, and what time does that take? And secondly, the question is connected. Reimbursing debt, is it annual, or is it at the end of the project?
I'm talking about the principal. And the storage costs that you talked about, because you talked about batteries. So anyway, does that change things, and does it have an impact on the cost of a project?
To answer the first question, the payback is below 10 years, at least in theory, on an investment, and this is quite independent of the way in which the project is managed or repowering. This is an important idea because our projects obviously are very profitable, and we internalize the margin. I shouldn't say this with all the bankers here, but part of the payback is paid in the margin, is absorbed in the margin.
There is margin on the O&M, EPC, et cetera, and therefore, we can say that there is part of it can be a negative equity after two or three years. Now, this does not mean that. Obviously, there is still a good volume, so pure payback is quite short. The debt, it's free amortizing. We are on European markets, which are full amortizing. Construction plus two, three, four years, roughly. It's built on 15-40 range, so it's fully amortizable. And there's an edge from the very beginning, which works on the returns on interest.
So that gives us a constant return over the long term. As far as storage is concerned, the last point, your last question, the projects are quite profitable just as a standalone. Obviously, this depends on the initial CapEx, but we look at it as a standalone. We can actually link up with new installations, but we've been thinking about these projects quite separately, independently of our other projects.
And here, once again, we got economic balance, which is well driven by the reduction in the CapEx, and the factor that we manage volatility. Let me add something, and I'd just like to say that from the very beginning, since our first projects, which go back to 2011 , and now, the economic parameters were the same. The payback was always identical.
However, during that period, interest rates could fluctuated. Sometimes they were 55%, sometimes they were lower. Sometimes the costs were also very different. So depended on the capitalistic investment in the megawatts of the project, we always had a payback, whatever the circumstances, of 8-10 years.
And now, on the screen that is a bit technical and will take a few seconds. So is the secured EBITDA only additive or current power EBITDA or included in the power EBITDA? Just to clarify, the secured EBITDA represents the secured portfolio, and so the secured portfolio means assets in operations, plus assets in construction, plus ready-to-build projects. Yes, the secured EBITDA includes the assets in operations.
Is the EBITDA embedded that you will have in two or three years after the date that we have communicated on the secured EBITDA? So the one you see in 2027, the 150, will be real in 2029. I t's embedded. It's here, it's 100% success rate, but it's not in the P&L yet.
[Foreign Language]
Léonard Stickel . I have two questions. First one, on subsidies that you might get from the French government. The budget is important, our deficit is huge. There may be decisions that will be taken soon, in parliament, which might have a negative effect on, renewables. Now, the rooftops, for example, are subsidized, and so have you thought of that as a risk in the past?
There was. And this is not something new. There are some subsidies that were removed, and then they were reinstated. So what about your projects? How do they fit in with that? Could this have an impact on your growth? Then another question: how can you have repowering without generating CapEx? So technically speaking, how does it work from an accounting point of view?
Let me answer both questions. The second one is easier. Perhaps I wasn't very clear in my presentation. It's just the first example, where the Lazaret power station, which is very specific, we had modules where the performance was below the 86% that we had planned for the eight or 9 years. And so, we used our guarantees on this, and therefore, it was the constructor who replaced the modules with new generation modules, so there was no CapEx.
And for the repowering projects, we have some projects where we're going to use these special guarantees that we have, but the idea is that we should have intrinsic profitability with these new modules. Of course, there are some areas where we don't actually have to rebuild power stations, and so we do buy bifacial modules.
Now, on government subsidies, this is a subject that comes up repeatedly. So there are two different subsidies: for standalone and for roofs. For standalone, we do not have any subsidies. If we have the capacity to sign negotiated contracts with companies or industrialists without any subsidy, that means that we've reached our segment of the market.
Now, the government is modeling that the CRE contracts will be neutral or negative for public finances in the next 20 years. And we have contributed hugely in the last three years to the government budgets because we were paying the market prices. Sometimes they are 200 or 300 megawatts and the government would buy it at 70 or 80.
There was a difference, and we were actually subsidizing in a way the state for that. We won't have any impact on our standalone ground installations. We are the cheapest source of energy, and we have an energy mix which is changing with new suppliers, new entrants that... Now we can say the rooftops, obviously, this would be slightly different, and this is why we are diversifying into this area.
Because of this, we have good support from consumers. We think that developing this, obviously, we have to start off with rooftops, with parking lots, et cetera. This was something which was well supported from the government and local authorities. Here, once again, the timescale is short.
So if there were to be a change in government policy, the costs that we have called up so far are not going to be affected. But if we want to get the hundred gigawatts goal, we won't manage to achieve it if we don't actually develop this without having the rooftops, the storage, the standalones, et cetera. And all the studies say that these hundred gigawatts, it has to be the goal for France in the next 30 years. But once again, that is our plan.
In your 2027 plan, the contribution of the 85 million megawatts, is that something which could be jeopardized if the government were to change their position and say that solar energy is great, but we can't really go along with this? So what would that represent in your EBITDA, or can it be replaced by something else?
2027 is not the risk because we are making our rates or tariffs secure right now. So what is going to change is what Clarisse was talking about. That is 2030 and beyond. If rooftops are to go away, then we've got to replace it with standalones, and here there's less of an issue. So I think that scenario is something that we should study.
It wouldn't have an impact anyway in the short term, in 2027, and in the long term, it would be more positive for us anyway, were the government to change its position and do away with the rooftops. To go from a CRE to a PPA, has the CRE contract got to be completed or finished, or can you just come out of it without any costs? Yes, you can come out of it without any costs if there have been no subsidies.
If there have been subsidies, you've got to repay them back. So obviously, we would not want to move to PPAs unless we have not got the subsidized input that we were talking about earlier on. We have four cases that was talked about earlier on, how there were four existing contracts at rates that were well below market rates, and the market rates was two or three times higher.
So those were ended, and we moved to a PPA without any compensation risk or having to pay. Obviously, if you have low rate CRE contracts, it's obviously easy to do this, and so that's what we normally do. In our portfolio, these are the ones that we are working on. Another question concerning the reserves. How is that set up? Is it made up of equity, or is there a cash input? Nowadays, the debt service reserve account is the sort of account has six months for servicing debt.
It's not really in cash. It's got a facility, it's a credit line, and therefore, in fact, covers initial CapEx. So we don't have a special reserve account for our debt servicing. Now, concerning O&M maintenance, the fact that we have decided to cover maintenance ourselves, this means that we can have a fixed price contract, which is given to the operators for curative and preventive work. And so here, once again, we don't have a cash trap to cover the maintenance costs. That is also included. I hope that's answered your question.
Hello, I'm Gilbert Dupont. I have three questions as well. Can you tell us what percentage of the secured portfolio... Sorry, the mic is very, the sound is really bad with this microphone. And what sort of assets are we talking about? Are we talking about development assets or other assets? My second question concerns the power EBITDA and the EUR 85 million goal. Does that include activities that you have already transferred to others?
And thirdly, the goals for 2030. You have said that it would be 3.5 megawatts as your goal in 2030. But if you look at 2027, if we apply the three-year formula to actually implement these assets, we should be at 2.5 and not 3.5. So do you think that in the years ahead or in the last three years, you're going to have more installations being set up more quickly?
Let me address that final question with the 3.5 gigawatts for 2030. I think it's important to realize that we are talking about a two- to three-year period right now to implement the secured portfolio and get it into operation. When you're talking about international projects, the timeframe is shorter. So that explains the ramp-up.
Furthermore, what you can see right now is only for France, because we started to get into different countries, but we don't have teams there. We only have development service agreements with local developers who are identifying projects for us right now. So in the secured portfolio, there's nothing outside of France. The gap will come from rooftops and international growth. 2.5 for France, which is what we already said at the beginning, and an extra gigawatt internationally and with small installations.
On the question related to farm downs, I'm going to let Photosol answer that because they know their assets better than anyone and the different types of assets. What I can tell you is that our target for 2027 is to have 10% of EBITDA being generated from capital gains at sale, and that's going to be handled on a discretionary basis, depending on the opportunities as they arise.
We're going to try and take the best deals and obviously adapt to the state of the market. Indeed, our farm down strategy is going to depend on a case-by-case analysis of operating assets. We do need to make sure there's a strategy that makes sense across geographies, technology, and profitability, and that's going to inform our choices.
For something to be recognized in EBITDA, it needs to be a current sale that we have a majority stake in. So that should guide your understanding of how we're going to handle it. It is gonna be small in an industrial scale, or it will, although it will help us adjust our cash position.
And also, we're going to see more farm downs once the portfolio achieves critical mass. It's not something that we can do now. You need recurrence for farm down transactions, and we don't have critical mass yet. And there was a question also on power EBITDA. So our forecasts for power EBITDA, our math is correct. We didn't include in future power EBITDA the assets that we intend to sell, if that was your question.
We have some online questions. I'm going to just read them out quickly. What is the availability and load rate on the French average, and are you the only owners? Yes, we are the sole owners of our assets. Now, average load, 15% plus, 1,250 plus, depending on sun and availability more than 19%, which is in line with the market expectations.
Thank you, sir. Thank you.
What will be the end contribution of Photosol to EBITDA for Rubis? Well, what we've tried to show you is that EBITDA is not necessarily the best metric to understand the business, although it's very popular right now. Of course, the percentage contribution, if you're looking at 2030, is going to depend on the performance of our other businesses, Rubis Energy, especially.
We discussed a 25% contribution to EBITDA by 2030. We believe that the figures that we've announced today are in line with that, with a range of 25%-30% for EBITDA contribution. However, I would like to underline that there is potential for volatility in the deployment. We've got Rubis Energy that had an excellent year, which means that it lowers our contribution in percentage if they have a good year, and 2030 is a quite long way out to making precise forecasts.
I'm just under 5.5% shareholder of Rubis, and in that respect, I allow myself to make more of a commentary than a question. Three months ago, just seven weeks before the end of the first half, 2024, we gathered at the Rubis annual general meeting, where it was declared that our subsidiary, Photosol, stood in profitability.
It was a statement meant to inspire confidence and assure us of the soundness of our investment. But today, with the full weight of evidence in our hands, we stand to question that truth and that declaration, for now we know, through the latest press release, that even the EBITDA of Photosol is in the negative, and that such may have been the case even at the time of that AGM.
The burden of high interest costs from the debt incurred to acquire Photosol weighs heavily upon us, and while we are not furnished with exact figures, we are left to estimate that the Photosol venture may have cost Rubis at least EUR 20 million in total losses over the first half of 2024. At the same time, it is painful to see Rubis profits tumbling. Group profits are down by an incredible 24% for that half year, an incredible 24% down.
These numbers paint a dire picture, and the reality of our situation is far from the stability and solid performance recently proclaimed by management. Rubis, a company once robust, now faces a sharp decline in profitability. In the face of such results, there can be no room for complacency.
No company, staring down the results we see today, should entertain the thought of maintaining a hemorrhaging subsidiary, let alone pouring more investments into it. Prudence and wisdom call upon us to act decisively. We must acknowledge the painful truth. It is time to sell Photosol, to cut our losses, and to steer Rubis away from this path of ruin. It is with a heavy heart that I must also speak of a deeper sadness, one that reflects the erosion of trust.
It is tragic that such truths have to be revealed to management, that they were not recognized and addressed from the start... Equally tragic is the fact that management stood before us and made statements they knew to be untrue. This breach of trust cannot go unspoken, for the foundation of any company lies in the honesty and integrity of its leaders.
Moreover, the Rubis share price has plummeted, losing two-thirds of its value from its peak. Yet, there seems to be no urgency, no concern whatsoever from the management, who appear unaffected by the losses endured by shareholders. In this moment, I must confess that I, too, have lost faith in the current leadership.
No longer can we afford to have at the helm those who do not hold the interests of Rubis shareholders at the core of their mission. It is time for change. We need leadership that is responsible, competent, and unwavering in its dedication to the welfare of this company and its shareholders. Only then can Rubis rise from this crisis and regain its strength, profitability, and the trust of those who have invested in its future. Let us resolve today, with clear minds and full hearts, to demand that change for the future of Rubis and for the prosperity of all who believe in its potential. Thank you.
Mr. Saman, you are an important shareholder of the group, and I clearly hear your comments. Let me first of all discuss the technical points, and then I'll let Marc and the Photosol team answer your other comments. There are a number of things at play here, and it's important to not conflate the drop in share price for Rubis with the event today and Photosol's acquisition.
The share price slide for Rubis dates to well before Photosol's acquisition. Photosol is undervalued in the share price, and we're working hard to make sure that the value of Photosol is recognized in Rubis's share prices. There is a strategy behind all of this, and you are perfectly allowed to not agree with us, but we believe in our strategy.
As managers, sorry, we need to guarantee the long-term viability of the company. Right now, as a company, as a European company, as a French company, we cannot allow ourselves to not have a renewable energy solution for our clients. We believe in it, and I'm very sad that you are not on board with that strategy.
But, we are not going to simply let ourselves die by not moving, sitting on assets that are going to move towards a trend that will lower their value. This is Europe. Our strategy is different for Africa, our strategy is different for the Caribbean. There's no question there. We have a positive environmental and social impact in those countries.
Rubis Energy is the main contributor to the group and will remain so. Right now, in distribution, there are fewer opportunities than in the past. That is a fact of the market. COVID was also very damaging to the world of energy and energy distribution. If there are other accretive opportunities that arise in distribution to feed into the build-up of our market positions in Africa and the Caribbean, we will look into them, and we go through acquisition opportunities every day, and we will follow them through if we need to.
In Europe, we have two businesses, LNG and renewables. We believe in that strategy, and there's nothing more than I can add to that. I have heard your comments, and, I think that we do need to clarify a number of statements. You discussed a negative Photosol EBITDA. Net income is negative, we did mention that, but EBITDA is not negative. That's the first thing.
We have a 24% drop in the net profit for the group, for the company this year. We've been communicating with the markets and our supervisory board on this, and within that drop, Photosol is a minor component. 2023 was an exceptional year for a number of reasons, with some exceptional non-recurring profits that were announced as non-recurring at the time, and we had been laying the groundwork so that the market understands the changes coming in 2024.
Photosol is not responsible for the drop in net profit, or at least is a minor component of that. Let's make sure that things are clear. Does anyone else want to add anything? I'm gonna answer a question and discuss something that is particularly important to us and maybe hasn't been underlined enough and feeds into Mr. Saman's concerns.
The question is: Are you looking at acquiring other projects, or are you looking more in-house? Now, of course, we are going to prefer internal projects. It's why we have 100 people working on development right now. And as a reminder, something that was developed in-house end-to-end is going to take five to six years, but will generate net value at EUR 200,000 per megawatt. So for five to six years, we're not generating any EBITDA. In fact, the EBITDA is negative during that period.
That being said, those projects do create value, and once they're secured, they are worth EUR 200,000 per megawatt. If they were developed in-house, we can look at third-party development projects, and then we'll need to look at whether it makes business sense to us to buy something that costs 100 or 50 thousand EUR per megawatt developed by a third party.
We might have bought 50 megawatts or so from third parties in the past, generally at building permit stages and in difficult market circumstances. The analysis we need to make here is how much we're buying something for and how much value it can create for us. And this is very important for you, Mr. Saman. I'd invite you to look at the value of the portfolio in EUR per megawatt, not in EBITDA generation, because current EBITDA does not reflect the value of the portfolio. This is fundamental.
We could talk about this at any point tomorrow, today, during the workshops, over lunch. But if there's one takeaway from this session, and I say it now, and I'm sure that other people will say it after me, EBITDA has never been a reflection of value for our company. I have a more practical question. With the increase in renewables in the energy mix, the network has become harder to manage.
Are you concerned that there may be more skimming, as we have in Brazil or in Germany, that may weigh down on your EBITDA forecast? This was part of what I said with the connections earlier. There's an increase in the share of small production plants that need to be plugged into the grid. We have talked a lot about alternative energy sources, for sure.
Right now, all of the projects that we're working on and that are generating revenue for us right now, all of them have coverage for those negative price periods, so we're not impacted by that, and we get financial compensation when it happens. However, this is an issue that is going to come up. It's already present in France. We see this as more of an opportunity source.
Without the complexity that comes from the balancing and the skimming, there wouldn't be any financial relevance to storage. Right now, as it stands, thanks to the issues that we have with capacity and availability, we're able to work on storage and financing and implementation and optimizations. There are all sorts of regulatory things and levers that can be pulled. Enedis, for example, right now, is not able to integrate storage in their network.
They add them rather than subtract them, which is a shame. These are things that are going to be solved in the coming months. So based on that, and thanks to the issues that we have, we can find positive business case scenarios in France, which is a strategic shift, because, basically, the non-reliability of renewable production is the final criticism that, Rubis has leveled against it after cleaning up its act, after solving regulatory issues, et cetera, et cetera.
And there was also the, residual exposure to spot prices or long-term... We only sell on long-term contracts. We do have some projects that we're able to sell on the market, and as in an emergency, measure, but even then, that was allowed for in the contract. So no, our revenue is not exposed to spot pricing.
[Foreign Language]
He said that the value of the projects with permits represent 200 MW, and this represent EUR 200,000. Robin was talking about this figure, which was a net margin, and in fact it's slightly higher. It gives you an initial size. Concerning the price of the megawatt which is being developed, we talked about 40% from the beginning to the finish and it's a good way of getting our matrix and getting an idea.
The market for these project permits is quite fluid, liquid, and also the other sorts of contracts are exact. If we have a margin of EUR 200,000, and if we look at the success rate, it gives you a good idea of a benchmark of the projects that are being developed.
I'd just like to say, each project is looked at separately. There's a discounted cash flow on each project. We can be slightly over, slightly below, but it gives you a good idea of getting an idea, but as Guillaume was saying earlier on, when we are looking at the payback, it doesn't necessarily get the value generation fully, because depending on our future repowering, financing, refinancing, we can go beyond the hundred thousand.
But on the market, these are the figures, and to repeat what Guillaume said, when a project or when we sign a lease, we have a 40% chance of getting to the end. So between 40% and 60% at 200,000, it's a probability ratio, and this gives you 80,000, and then, you can go up to 200,000 and do your own math.
I have three questions. Concerning storage, first of all, are you just keeping storage with batteries, but are you also looking at other standalone storage projects? And have you estimated the capacity in the group, intragroup? And my last question, in your CapEx, what are your hypotheses, for the cost of the megawatts and the decrease in the years ahead?
Well, when we're talking about storage, in the 50 megawatts that I talked about earlier on, we have storage batteries in our existing power stations, or the ones to be built, or standalone batteries, and this allows us to have a overall approach and understand and analyze each of the projects or economic models that are possible.
Up till now, there are new ways that are also becoming available, and this means that we've got to look at the project in a more interesting angle. Concerning technology, we're working on battery technology a great deal. Obviously, this is the most mature, and it has the biggest decrease in costs. It's like electric cars who are being working on this.
In fact, our teams have actually been able to give us an update on the reduction in the costs because of new technology. But we're also looking at different new ways of storing these issues, hydro or other sources, so that we can have different storage options and just keep the leftover. So we are open to these ideas, and we think that we're at the same stage that 15 years ago when we started off with solar energy.
And in fact, the advantage is that we are quite agnostic. There are lots of different options, so we can be flexible and find the right approach. A question on synergy with Rubis Energy. As we said earlier on, we have partnerships that are being set up between Photosol teams and this concerns the small installations, and this is why it was quite interesting how to look at this activity more closely, and we are going to mainly concentrate in Europe.
Our clients, large, private, or public companies, ask us to have a renewable solution for our projects, so it's also a way of protecting ourselves and reaching out to new clients, adding to the services that we are proposing with renewables. For the time being, this is mainly in France. We're looking at other European areas as well, but in most of the French overseas territories, for example, La Réunion, the Caribbean, and also the English-speaking Caribbean.
In the next three or five years, we think there will be approximately three megawatts, which will be set up with Rubis Energy and Photosol. On CapEx, EUR 600,000-EUR 700,000 per mega for a ground and one and a half times that for a roof. This is a massive market where there have been technological improvements. Module prices have gone down from 25 to much lower, and we've not actually got to the end of that, so there is a real improvement that is taking place.
Obviously, it depends on the size of the project, but there are going to be improvements. This doesn't mean that the 2027 guidance is going to change because the CapEx has been fixed on that. So in most of the cases, this will not have an impact, but it might have an impact in the longer term.
When you look at the value, however, it doesn't have an impact. Because if you're looking at PPAs or CRE bids, when there have been increases, then the electricity prices go up and the CapEx goes up as well. Obviously, we are happy to have CapEx transfers, but it's something which I think is something which is managed quite well.
Uh, [Foreign Language]
There was one question on small, modules and farm down. Why do you have farm down on small power stations rather than on only large ones? Well, profitability is, can be compared, but obviously, if you have, higher costs, then we need, high investments. Rooftops, we talked about this earlier on, the development is shorter, and we can get financing it.
So why is it a good idea for farm down? Because, the idea is, that we want to have a sort of unified, approach, to these assets, and, this is not going to have an impact on the, development projects, but it has a value when you look at owners, when you look at landowners, et cetera. We have, less, issues if we have farm down.
Based on our experience, creating value and generating value over the whole life span is something that we manage quite well with power stations, the standalone ones. Can you come back to what you need for the 2027 and 2020 results, in volume, and in total? Does this mean that you're going to have to increase power generation between now and 2027 ?
[Foreign Language]
On investments, for 2027, we're talking of total EUR 1.1 billion between 2024 and 2027. Given the amount we're putting into development, obviously, you can say that this curve will be exponential. For 2030, I mean, we can talk about that at some other point, and you can actually, maybe, calculate it in the same way.
You have said that you have a margin four times greater for development costs when you have a permit, and the margin is EUR 200,000 per megawatt for that sort of project. Can you confirm that megawatt represents 250,000? And what would the value of it be after construction, and can you confirm?
To answer that, when we're talking about EUR 200,000 per megawatt, I'm talking about the creation of value, that is after we've repaid the debt and development costs. So we have a margin then. And the development costs per project, when you say EUR 50,000, yes, that would be the case.
But if you look at each project, sometimes it could be below EUR 50,000 or could be over. It's an average. When you look at all the different projects, you see the projects that were lost or the costs on those and the projects that are successful, we could say that 50 megawatts is a good figure for you to have an understanding of this. So the project could be EUR 200,000, EUR 300,000, EUR 500,000, depending.
The only idea is to have a DCF, and if you have a margin of EUR 200,000 of value creation, well, this, I think, is a good proxy. Is there a difference now between a ready-to-build project and a project which is going to be managed or run? I think it's not really a huge difference. If you look at the flows that come in from a to-be-built or ready-to-build, there may be a difference between 50.
And 10 years ago, if you had a project which was actually being run or one which was ready to build, it was quite different because construction costs were not managed in the same way. So if we want to cut this down, we could have EUR 200,000 for secured projects which are ready to build.
Once again, it is a good proxy, but if you want to look at this more closely, you have to look at the DCFs of each project and each portfolio. Do you want to add something? I'd just like to add something about the assets that are operational. If you look at the portfolio value, you can see it's below the EUR 200,000, obviously, because of that. If you agree, and if there are no other questions, I would suggest that we stop now, and we can meet over lunch and have a..
We can continue our discussions. There are four workshops this afternoon. One on power stations. Secondly, the funding or financing of a power station. Thirdly, geographical spread in Europe, and the fourth one on small ground installations and its business model. Thank you.