Good afternoon, shareholders, and a warm welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Fortum on my behalf. I shall start my presentation by showing what Fortum is like as a company today before I go through the events and performance of 2024, as well as our strategy and its execution. Today, Fortum has a competitive and solid position in the Nordics. Up to 99% of the energy we produce is low emission, so it derives from nuclear power or renewable energy sources such as hydropower, wind, and solar. 90% of our comparable EBITDA came from the generation segment, and most of its operating margin comes from our power generation. We are the third cleanest power generator in Europe. The specific emissions of the power we generate are only 11 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. Our direct carbon dioxide emissions were very low last year, 1.3 million tons.
In 2024, personal satisfaction and engagement continued to rise strongly for the second year in a row. We continued to invest in the foundation of satisfaction, well-being, and safety at work, for instance, through comprehensive well-being and safety trainings. The impact of this can also be seen, for example, in the number of sick leaves, which at company level fell from the previous year to less than 3%. Over the past year, we worked on a common understanding among Fortum employees of how we move towards success, known to us as the Fortum Way. Its aim is to deepen our understanding of the foundation and strategy of our operations and to help us act in line with our values. I will come back to our new values published this year a little later in my presentation.
In the area of culture and leadership, important themes in 2024 were developing leadership, and we particularly invested in skills that help to manage the change and to succeed in strategy execution. According to our strategic priorities, we also continued to renew our organization and competence with the change programs carried out in several units. Extensive reforms were implemented in the IT and digitalization unit and in the units focusing on consumer and corporate clients. At the end of the year, the headcount of the company was around 4,500, reflecting the impact of divestments in reducing the number of staff. The breakdown of personnel by country is broadly the same as in the previous year. Our diverse leadership team has strong and varied expertise in the energy sector.
Five of the 10 members of the group leadership team are women, even after we get two new leadership team members during the spring and summer. I am very pleased that our new Legal Director, Kati Levoranta, and our HR Director, Karin Svensen-Nyborg, joined our team. Their broad experience in Nordic companies that are leading in their industry supports the development of our business and group functions when we move on towards our future targets. I would like to introduce the current members of our leadership team. First, our Chief Financial Officer, Tiina Tuomela. Then, Mikael Lemström, Executive Vice President in Hydro Generation. Petra Lundström, Executive Vice President in Nuclear Generation. Simon Erik Ollus, Executive Vice President of Corporate Customers and Markets. Mikael Rönnblad, Executive Vice President in Consumer Solutions and Digitalization and Innovation. Petter Strandegård, Executive Vice President in Renewables and Decarbonization.
Finally, Nebahat Albayrak, Executive Vice President in Sustainability and Corporate Relations. All in all, we pay special attention to the diversity of the leadership teams in business and support functions, both in terms of gender and nationality. The number of women in senior management has risen over the past years. In 2024, 38% of the top management were women. Let's now go through some key events as well as performance of last year. Last year, Fortum focused on its core businesses, optimizing our best-in-class operations, divesting non-core operations, and implementing efficiency improvement actions. With these measures, among others, we are building the foundation of preparedness for our future growth. We continue to see robust underlying customer demand, which we believe reflects the power demand growth in longer term. Our goal is to be ready for the growth phase while ensuring strong financial performance even in a turbulent operating environment.
In 2024, the power market was characterized by volatile but lower power prices compared to the previous year. The lower Nordic spot power prices were reflected especially in our financial results throughout the year. However, our achieved power price reached a good level through successful hedging and physical optimization. We continued our efficiency improvement program with the target to gradually lower annual fixed costs by €100 million, excluding inflation, by the end of this year. By the end of 2024, we reduced our fixed cost base by more than €60 million. The strategic review of the circular solutions businesses that are defined as non-strategic progressed well during 2024. The recycling and waste business, the turbine and generator services, and the bio-based solutions business were divested. We will continue our strategic review of the remaining businesses. We promoted our strategy with determination during the year.
This is connected, for instance, to having our ambitious science-based climate targets validated by an external operator. I will soon tell you more about promoting the strategy and our sustainability targets. Our financial position continues to be strong with very low leverage at the end of the year. On that note, Fortum's Board of Directors is proposing a dividend of €1.40 per share, corresponding to 140% of the earnings per share. This is comprised of €0.90 corresponding to a 90% payout of comparable earnings per share and a special dividend of €0.50. All in all, the dividend corresponds to a 10.4% yield according to the share price at the end of the year. Through the proposed special dividend, Fortum activates its balance sheet and rectifies its current very strong liquidity position. By and large, I think we succeeded well last year in a still quite volatile market environment.
The biggest thanks, naturally, goes to our committed personnel that has made this possible. Next, I shall go through the most essential comparable financial figures concerning the development of Fortum's continuing operations for the whole year 2024. We managed to reach a solid yield, although power prices were clearly lower than the year before. I am particularly pleased with our ability to optimize our production, where our performance was even higher than our guidelines. The comparable profit/EBIT for the whole year 2024 was €1.2 billion in total. Our comparable earnings per share were exactly €1 per share. Our balance sheet continued to strengthen. Fortum's financial net debt to comparable EBITDA was 0.2 x at the end of 2024, while it was 0.5 at the end of the previous year. The maximum level we set is 2x to 2.5 x.
The low leverage gives us a solid foundation to continue preparing for growth and developing Fortum. Let's take a closer look at our performance. The comparable EBITDA decreased in 2024 compared to the previous year, being €1.6 billion. Also, the comparable operating profit declined, being €1.2 billion. The comparable net result was €900 million. The comparable earnings per share in 2024 were €1 exactly. In Fortum's dividend policy, the payout ratio is 60% - 90% of the group's comparable earnings per share. As mentioned, the proposed dividend consists of €0.90, corresponding to a 90% payout of comparable earnings per share, and of a special dividend of €0.50. The full-year net cash flow from operating activities was €1.4 billion. The decrease in cash flow from the previous year was mainly due to the lower comparable EBITDA. The balance sheet total at the end of 2024 was just over €17 billion.
The balance sheet total decreased mainly due to the divestment of our recycling and waste business. We have a very good financial position, and our balance sheet is very strong. Our total equity is over €9 billion, and our interest-bearing debt at the end of the year was €4.8 billion. At the same time, we have a very strong liquidity position. At the end of the year, we have sufficient liquidity reserves, €8.2 billion in total, of which €4.1 billion are liquid assets and €4.1 billion are unraised standby credits and overdraft facilities. With a strong liquidity position, we continue to optimize our cash and credit lines to manage the future impact of volatile electricity prices and changing market sentiment. We aim to maintain adequate and optimal liquidity while minimizing net financing costs. I will now discuss how we executed our strategy last year.
To start with, here you can see the core of our strategy that we published in 2023. With our power, we want to build a world where people, businesses, and nature thrive together. To achieve this purpose, we need to transform and develop to be able to deliver clean energy reliably and drive the decarbonization of industry, i.e., to reduce carbon emissions. You can also see on this slide our new values that I referred to earlier, which guide us in our everyday work and in the execution of our strategy. These are: we aim high, we care, we win together. The decarbonization and electrification of industry are expected to even double the demand for power by 2050, as you can see in the right-hand graph. The increase in demand is expected from several sectors, such as different industrial and hydrogen projects and data centers.
The Nordic countries are a particularly attractive location to energy-intensive industries which require energy at a large scale. Energy prices in the Nordics have historically been extremely competitive compared with continental Europe. The Nordics have another significant advantage. Our energy systems are really clean. Almost all output comes from zero-emission energy sources. Last year, we continued to execute our strategy with determination, and let's look now more closely at what we achieved. Starting with our priority, we delivered reliable, clean energy. In 2024, we focused on our core business in power generation and promoted several relevant projects to be able to meet even better the needs of the system, society, and our customers. Our objective is to ensure productivity and security of supply now and in the long term. The extension of the lifetime of the Loviisa nuclear power plant until 2050 progressed as planned.
We decided to modernize the low-pressure turbines, among other things. We also reached an important milestone in securing a reliable Western alternative for our nuclear fuel supply when we loaded the first batch of Westinghouse fuel to Loviisa in August. We promoted in several ways our exit plan from all coal-based generation in the company's own activities. As part of the Espoo Clean Heat Programme, we closed the last coal-fired unit for district heat production a year ahead of schedule. We also decided to invest €100 million in the decarbonization of the Czestochowa CHP plant in Poland. Our commitment to the clean transition is at the core of our strategy. We worked on our science-based climate targets last year and had them validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative, SBTi, in January of this year. Let us look at our priority called Driving Decarbonization in Industry.
There we continue to see robust underlying customer demand. We believe this reflects the power demand growth in longer term. Long-term partnerships play a vital role in ensuring predictability in long-term energy procurement and advancing electrification. We are well placed to offer our customers both new renewable energy and base load supplied in the lifetime extended Loviisa nuclear power plant until 2050. We are getting ready for future growth by developing renewable energy projects for wind and solar, which we can start executing at customers' request. We have onshore wind and solar projects of approximately 5 gigawatts in permit processes across the Nordic countries, with more to come in early development phases. We started to develop several potential sites across Finland that can be offered to our customers for data center or industrial use.
One of these sites, in Rauma, we started to develop a site for a sustainable synthetic aviation fuel plant together with Nordisk E-fuel and the Port of Rauma. We continued our feasibility study on the prerequisites for new nuclear power and published the results last week. It is our conclusion that there are no economic conditions for the construction of a new nuclear plant for the time being. We will continue to develop new nuclear power as an alternative in the long run. Potential decisions will be taken in the far future. Instead, an excellent alternative is the extension of a lifetime of a plant, as we have done in Loviisa, which is free from risks and also profitable. We have started to explore possibilities for flexible pumped storage hydropower in Sweden to provide much-needed flexible balancing power.
To conclude, I'd like to say a few words about our priority transforming and developing, which is mainly connected to internal transformation. The strategic review of the circular solutions business, which are not at the core of Fortum's strategy, progressed well during 2024. We divested our recycling and waste business, the turbine and generator services, and the bio-based solutions business. The sales price of the recycling and waste business was approximately €800 million on a debt and cash flow basis, and we recorded a tax-exempt capital gain of €176 million in the fourth quarter. We continued our efficiency program with the target of progressively reducing annual fixed costs by €100 million, excluding inflation, by the end of 2025. In 2024, we diminished our recurring fixed cost base by more than €60 million.
At the same time, we have taken measures influencing fixed cost in order to be prepared for future growth, such as the development of renewables and new sites. You may remember that we published the strategic targets last year with clear key performance indicators, KPIs, to measure progress and our work. The targets are set for four strategically relevant sectors, which we want to improve in order to ensure optimal performance and risk management. We, first of all, want to ensure a high fleet availability of nuclear and hydropower to strengthen our leadership position in the Nordics. This is also beneficial for the security of supply. The availability rates of our power plants have historically been very good, and we aim to improve them even further.
Last year, we met our hydro availability KPI but fell short of our long-term nuclear availability target because there were several unplanned and extended outages during the year. Secondly, our flexible hydropower resources are a strong competitive advantage in creating value. Our guidance for the so-called optimization premium from flexible energy generation is at €6 to €8 per megawatt hour for our entire power generation, which has historically been around €1 to €3 per megawatt hour. There are several factors influencing optimization, the key ones being flexibility and environmental values, i.e., the guarantees of origin of hydro and nuclear power. Here, we reached a very good outcome, €8.7 per megawatt hour last year. Despite the overrun, we will keep the €6 to €8 target for the future. Our third target is to stabilize income streams.
In order to reduce our exposure to power prices, we hedge our power generation to ensure predictable and steady cash flow. It is our objective to increase the share of long-term energy procurement contracts with our industrial customers. Our target is to hedge at least 20% of our outright generation volume in the rolling 10-year period by the end of 2026. At year end, we had hedged 18% of our generation volume for the years 2025 to 2034. The fourth KPI is linked to our capacity to invest in longer-term growth once demand picks up. We are developing potential investment project pipelines for solar and onshore wind generation. Our target is to have a minimum of 800 megawatt ready-to-build capacity by the end of 2026.
We are on track with this target as there are some 5 gigawatts of onshore wind and solar projects in the permit processes across the Nordic countries, with more to come in early development phases. Here you can see some of our investments that were ongoing last year. The Espoo Clean Heat Programme was making good progress at the Espoo and Kirkkonummi sites where waste heat will be taken off the upcoming Microsoft data centers and at the electricity-based plant in the Nojala site, Espoo. All in all, we want to invest around €300 million in the Espoo Clean Heat Programme. In our renewables business, the Pjelax Wind Farm, the third largest in Finland, that the Chairman also referred to, was fully commissioned in the second quarter of last year.
Its commercial operations started at the beginning of July in the context of a power purchase agreement with Helsinki Energy Helen. The lifetime extension at the Loviisa nuclear power plant is on track. Capital expenditure there will total around €1 billion between 2023 and 2050. We also took the decision to invest €100 million in the decarbonization of our Czestochowa CHP plant in Poland. In addition, we started to develop several potential sites suitable for data center and industrial use, but this does not involve important capital. We have estimated that the group's capital expenditure for the years 2025 to 2027 would amount to €1.4 billion, of which annual growth capital expenditure is estimated to be in the range of €150 to €300 million. Possible acquisitions are not included in these figures.
New investment decisions can be taken depending on how the market situation and investment environment develop, and they could be around €250 million. While making prudent and selected investments, we remain able to pay a dividend in line with our dividend policy. During the past five years, we have paid out €5.1 billion in dividends, including this year's proposed dividend. I will now address our capital allocation principles. Our priorities are connected to how we use our balance sheet, make investments, and pay dividends to shareholders. We follow closely the trends in the markets but continue being prudent and disciplined in our capital allocation. Our key target is to ensure that our credit rating remains at minimum triple B. As we've said, our financial net debt to comparable EBITDA can be 2.0 to 2.5 at most. Today, our balance sheet is very strong and leverage is closer to zero.
Our strong financial position was noticed last year by Standard & Poor's, which raised our credit rating to triple B plus with stable outlook. The logic behind our capital allocation is that where investment potential is limited and we do not make large investments, we allocate more capital to shareholders as dividend. Instead, if and when we have profitable capital expenditure projects, we will allocate less capital to our shareholders' dividend returns and more to promising projects. Since customer demand of power in the Nordics is now at a low, we don't see profitable investment opportunities into new production capacity that would meet our criteria. Capital expenditure always means building profitable megawatts. As I said before, we are now building up our investment readiness to be prepared for the growth in demand. Following our dividend policy, we pay between 60% and 90% of our comparable earnings per share as dividend.
The payout ratio is constructed so that the upper end of the range is applied in situations with a strong balance sheet and lowest investments, while the lower end of the range would be applied with high leverage and/or significant investments. For this reason, we now prioritize higher dividends. You can see this in the board's dividend proposal, which aims to improve the use of the company's own capital and rectify its current very strong liquidity position. I would now like to address a very important theme to us, sustainability and our targets concerning the climate and biodiversity. As I told you earlier, we drafted our science-based emissions reduction targets during 2024 to have them validated by the international Science-Based Targets initiative. In January 2025, we were happy to introduce our ambitious SBTi-verified targets, which include net zero greenhouse gas emissions across our value chain by 2040.
Our own emissions are low even today, but we nevertheless aim at reductions in excess of what the 1.5 degrees would require. When drafting our SBTi targets, we kept our coal exit target by the end of 2027, as well as our targets for specific emissions. Our ambitious biodiversity target remains as they were to have no net loss of biodiversity from existing and new operations from 2030 onwards. In addition, the company will reduce its negative terrestrial impacts in upstream production by 50% by the year 2030. We are currently working on a detailed group-level biodiversity transition plan and expect it to be completed by the end of this year. Before I finish my intervention, I would like to thank you, dear shareholders, on behalf of the whole Fortum Group and personally, for your trust in us.
Together with you, we want to advance the energy transition, mitigate climate change, and use our power to build a world where people, businesses, and nature thrive together. Thank you very much.