Good morning. Thanks for joining Kate and me today for Centrica's 2021 results. Again, we're doing this virtually, but I look forward to meeting many of you in person over the coming weeks. In total, our presentation will last around 40 minutes. Then we'll have a live Q&A session where Kate and I will be joined by our chairman, Scott Wheway. Let's take a minute to reflect on where we are. COVID's now part of our day-to-day life. Global energy prices have surged. U.K. energy regulation is in need of a huge overhaul. In short, 2021 was another eventful year. I think we've navigated the environment well, and we've played our part in both helping to stabilize the U.K. market and to drive the required fundamental regulatory change. What did we deliver last year? We made good progress in further focusing and de-risking our portfolio.
Financial performance was resilient with adjusted earnings per share up by a half to 4.1 pence, free cash flow, including disposal proceeds of GBP 3.8 billion as we continue our focus on capital discipline and cash generation. I'm disappointed in the results from British Gas Services & Solutions, but it is understandable when you see the impact of materially higher absence rates and global supply chain issues. I'll come back to this later. By now, I think you know that we are both disciplined and focused on shareholder returns, and you can be sure that this will continue. We're making good progress on improving all of our businesses, but there's more to do to ensure we have a great platform for growth and that we can benefit from the opportunities in the move to net zero. That includes deployment of capital in flexible and distributed energy generation opportunities.
With the triennial pension negotiations due to conclude in the middle of this year, we very much hope to be in a position to restart the dividend soon. We're now well into the turnaround of Centrica, so let's have a look at the progress that we've made. As you know, before you finish one stage, you need to start the next. I'm really delighted that we've made progress across all three pillars of our turnaround. Our most important building block was to simplify and de-risk our portfolio, and in the process of doing so, strengthen our balance sheet. The sale of Direct Energy and Spirit Energy's Norwegian business, which together raised over GBP 3 billion, substantially completes this part of the turnaround. However, portfolio management is an active and a permanent feature of any well-run company.
We are continually looking for ways to realize value from our assets. Indeed, we've raised well over GBP 150 million from the sale of smaller non-core assets in the past two years. As a result of this portfolio simplification and our relentless focus on cash, our balance sheet has been significantly strengthened, and we've eliminated our net debt. Stabilizing our business and improving operational performance required focused business units and the elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy. By splitting British Gas into separate energy and services and solutions businesses, eliminating 4,000 mainly management roles, and establishing a maximum of seven layers in the organization, we've made real progress here. We've got new U.K. terms and conditions in place. This was painful, and I asked a lot of my colleagues, but it was necessary to provide a platform from which we could grow.
I'm delighted that we're seeing much improved colleague engagement. I cannot overstate just how crucial an engaged workforce is. All great companies have got high engagement. We're now seeing engagement levels last seen in our company in the middle of the last decade. We've still got a long way to go, and we're focused on improving our operational performance and our customer service. We'll come back to that later. Of course, we've got to look to the future to deliver growth. It's much more fun to work in a growing company. For us who delivered growth this year, we have to make this a recurring habit. The opportunities presented by net zero are substantial, and we are very, very well positioned.
We're continually assessing where the growth opportunities lie in this evolving area, and the skill will be having the capabilities to capture the opportunities and the flexibility to change course as and when required. We'll continue to develop our range of net zero propositions for customers while investigating options to repurpose existing assets and invest more capital in attractive, flexible, distributed generation to deliver the energy transition. I'll come back to you to provide more color on some of these areas later, but for now, let me hand you over to Kate.
Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. Let me move straight on to the results. I'll focus on continuing operations, which excludes Direct Energy following the completion of its sale in January 2021. Revenue was up 22% to GBP 18.3 billion, and gross margin increased 23% to GBP 2.9 billion, reflecting the significant increase in commodity prices, which we have seen in the second half of the year. Operating costs reduced by nearly GBP 100 million, broadly in line with the expectations we laid out at the start of the year. Operating profit was up 112%, although you can see a much larger tax charge as a significant proportion of this profit was made in the more highly taxed E&P businesses.
Net finance costs were lower as we benefited from our decision to redeem the EUR 750 million euro hybrid at its first call date in April. Adjusted earnings per share were 4.1p, up 46% on 2020. Note that 1.3 pence of the 2021 EPS relates to the Spirit Energy assets we are selling. Moving now on to operating profit, which we have shown here on both a pre-tax and post-tax basis. This highlights that the operating profit increased by GBP 501 million. After an increase in the tax charge of more than GBP 400 million, post-tax operating profit was up by a little under GBP 100 million. Let's start with British Gas Services & Solutions. This is a disappointing result. With operating profit down GBP 70 million to GBP 121 million.
At the interims, we said that COVID and industrial action had cost us GBP 50 million in the first half of the year. This was similar to the gross impact of COVID on the services business in 2020, which was partly mitigated by furlough proceeds. Higher absentee rates have continued into the second half of 2021. This, combined with a difficult job market from which to recruit skilled engineers, meant we used more contractors at higher rates and paid more customer compensation. In addition, the global microchip shortage is limiting boiler availability and reduced the number of installations. Together, these factors cost us around GBP 25 million. We were also impacted by a decrease in the average number of customers and a changed customer mix. The impact of all of these factors was only partially offset by cost efficiency benefits and lower depreciation.
Chris will talk to our plans to drive improved performance in this business shortly. Moving on to British Gas Energy. As a reminder, this business unit now includes around 450,000 small business sites transferred from Centrica Business Solutions. Given their needs closely match those of households, we provided a reconciliation to 2020 adjusted operating profit from the previous segmentation in an appendix. Operating profit was up by GBP 36 million to GBP 118 million, but we lost GBP 54 million in the second half of the year. We benefited from favorable weather conditions in the first half, as colder than normal weather increased demand, and then again in the fourth quarter, as warmer than normal temperatures allowed us to sell a small portion of surplus gas and power back into a high-priced commodity market.
However, there was a negative impact from the significant increase in commodity prices over the second half of the year, combined with the price cap. We had more customers move on to a default tariff, for whom we had to purchase gas and power from the market at prices well above the cap level we are allowed to charge customers. We also saw increased Renewable Obligation Certificate mutualization costs, which are not recoverable, due to the unprecedented level of supplier failures. We did deliver cost efficiencies and benefited from a rebound of most of the COVID impacts, including a more normalized bad debt charge. However, these were largely offset by higher ECO costs as flagged a year ago, and the cost of dual running IT systems as we start to migrate customers to our more flexible digital platform. Next on to Centrica Business Solutions.
Operating losses reduced by GBP 80 million to GBP 52 million. Within this, energy supply made a small profit, having been materially loss-making in 2020, with the COVID impact significantly lower than 2020. New energy services losses reduced by GBP 32 million, seeing growth in revenue and gross margin, particularly in the asset optimization space, and there was no repeat of a $16 million US solar provision booked in 2020. In Ireland, Bord Gáis Energy operating profit was down GBP 14 million to GBP 28 million, which was due to the Whitegate CCGT being out for the majority of the year. The plant is now back online, and we expect Bord Gáis profits to move back up toward historic levels going forward. Switching now to Energy Marketing & Trading, where operating profit was down GBP 104 million to GBP 70 million.
As a reminder, this is where we manage the group's commodity exposure in relation to customer commitments, our assets, and contract risk management. In addition, we manage nearly 12 terawatt-hours of third-party power purchase and balancing agreements, and put a modest amount of risk capital into proprietary trading. I am pleased with the risk management and trading performance in the current volatile market. In LNG, whilst an exceptionally good 2020 result was not repeated, hedging in previous years won't allow us to fully benefit from the more favorable spreads in 2022. We have managed future risk by selling cargos a few years forward at a profit. This de-risking of the portfolio increases my confidence that should forward spreads broadly hold at current levels, this could be a profitable activity for us for the next few years.
Although the loss from the legacy gas contract of GBP 85 million was GBP 27 million higher than in 2020, this is lower than we expected at the interims. Encouragingly, with the contract end within sight, we expect losses to be around 100 million better in total than previously forecast over the remaining four years, and to average around GBP 50 million pounds per year. Lastly, I'll talk to the upstream businesses. Pre-tax operating profit was up GBP 573 million to GBP 663 million. After an increase of nearly GBP 500 million in tax, profit after tax was up by GBP 93 million to GBP 211 million. The majority of the change is in Spirit Energy, where pre-tax operating profit increased by GBP 540 million. Achieved prices were up significantly, as you would expect.
However, production was down 18% in line with the 15%-20% guidance we provided at half year. Depreciation rates were higher given impairment write-backs at half year. Around 90% of this profit was generated by the Norwegian assets we are selling. We've provided more details in the appendix. CSL operating profit increased by GBP 54 million, with the benefit of higher prices being partially offset by lower volumes as the Rough asset nears the end of its life. In nuclear, the operating loss increased by GBP 21 million as extended outages not only reduced volumes below 2020 levels, but meant we had to buy some hedges back into the market at a loss. Let me now talk to cash flow, which was again very strong, and we finished the year at a GBP 618 million net cash position.
You should note that this includes a temporary balance of nearly GBP half a billion of margin cash, which is a function of the sharp rise in commodity prices over the fourth quarter. Free cash flow from continuing operations was up 71% to just under GBP 1.2 billion. Taking you through the drivers in turn. EBITDA was up by GBP 515 million, broadly in line with the increase in operating profit, while cash tax was GBP 138 million higher. Working capital was an outflow, of which GBP 113 million related to us taking on Supplier of Last Resort customers. We expect this figure to increase through the first quarter of 2022, but we will start recovering this cost from the second quarter and into 2023. We also continue to see spend on E&P decommissioning.
Given the change in purpose of the Spirit portfolio from exploration and production to production, we would expect this to continue to be a factor until decommissioning is largely complete around the end of this decade. We have enforced more discipline in our spend on CapEx and exceptional items. Net investment reduced by GBP 120 million, with lower CapEx on both Spirit Energy and IT. Within this, British Gas Energy CapEx was reduced by GBP 37 million compared with last year. We are now expensing costs related to the new British Gas Energy platform as we develop cloud-based software as a service partnerships, having historically capitalized spend on developing and maintaining the legacy SAP billing system. Exceptional cash flows, which relate largely to our 2020 restructuring program, were GBP 44 million lower.
As I said before, we don't expect any future restructuring costs to be charged as exceptional items to the P&L. Free cash flow from discontinued operations relates to Direct Energy, with 2020 reflecting the performance of the business and 2021 the disposal proceeds. A few words to help you orient the Spirit cash for the disposed assets. We consolidated over GBP 500 million of Spirit cash flows in 2021 relating to the assets we've sold. We will need to pay a further GBP 300 million of tax which relates to those cash flows in 2022. We expect a GBP 250 million minority dividend to be paid to our partner when the deal completes. We have in effect already received a little more than our share of the proceeds from the sale already. This is set out for you in an appendix slide.
Strengthening and maintaining a robust balance sheet has been and remains one of my main priorities as CFO, and I'm pleased with the progress over the last 12 months. Our credit metrics and investment grade ratings are well supported. As a reminder, we are rated Baa2, negative outlook, and triple B stable. This credit rating has been very valuable during the market turmoil. It also means we are well placed to cope with any future regulatory changes regarding the energy supply market, which Ofgem may consider, and withstand any shorter term working capital pressures resulting from the current energy crisis. We still need to conclude the March 2021 triennial pensions review, which we expect to do around the middle of the year.
On a roll-forward basis from the March 2018 review, the technical provisions deficit was estimated to be GBP 1.3 billion at the end of 2021, down from GBP 1.5 billion in June. As you would expect, we'll continue with a prudent balance sheet approach to underpin our strong investment-grade credit ratings. With that as a backdrop, I would like to provide some clarity on our approach to other aspects of our financials as we look to grow shareholder value. We will seek to at least maintain and then grow our operating cash flow over time. Although we may need to look through timing difference in some of those years, like those related to Supplier of Last Resort working capital in 2021 and the phasing of decommissioning spend. This operating cash flow will in part be underpinned by the focused cost management.
This is not just about reducing operating costs, it's about ensuring that costs are productive, hence my focus on the relationship between cost and gross profit. In 2021, excluding our upstream businesses, this ratio was 85%. Clearly, the business unit profit mix can have an influence on this number, but over time, we would be looking to drive a reduction from the current ratio as our transformation activities deliver. We will remain disciplined in the deployment of capital. Maintenance CapEx in our customer-facing businesses is expected to remain at its current level of around GBP 100 million per year, excluding Spirit Energy CapEx. We will also look to invest in growth opportunities in support of the energy transition.
For example, our investment in two gas peaking plants in Ireland and in solar and battery projects, subject of course to appropriate returns. We remain absolutely focused on delivering cash returns to shareholders over time. As Chris has already said, with the greater clarity on the triennial pension negotiations, we should soon be in a position to restart paying dividends. Finally, let me cover the outlook for 2022. I'm going to start with commodity prices. At current levels, these are very positive for upstream, and the rule of thumb we provide should help guide you. Be mindful, however, of increased depreciation following valuation write-backs and increased outage risk, as our production is now reliant on fewer and on balance older assets. To finish the upstream picture, we'll no longer report earnings from Norwegian and Statfjord-fueled assets when that deal completes.
The retained Spirit business is likely to produce around 90% of its 2021 volumes, and depreciation will be around GBP 8 per barrel higher. In EMT, we expect a legacy gas contract loss a bit above GBP 50 million and LNG to be in the black. British Gas Energy has a wide range of potential outcomes, as we remain exposed to changes to the regulatory market structure and customer behavior, as well as to weather, commodity price movements, and bad debt. However, the default price cap increase from 1 April should enable us to cover the costs we expect to incur from customers unexpectedly switching from fixed tariffs to the default tariff and stranded supplier of last resort costs for customers on fixed price tariffs. In British Gas Services & Solutions, we don't expect to see an immediate bounce back from the external factors we are facing.
Inflationary and supply chain pressures are continuing to impact us, and COVID-related absence rates have remained high in the first couple of months of 2022. We also plan to invest to drive improvements in customer service levels to underpin customer retention and preserve long-term value in the business. Overall, the outlook for 2022 is positive, and we are well-positioned for growth in most of our customer-facing businesses. However, we'll remain focused on actively managing risks and maintaining our strong balance sheet position for the long-term benefit of our shareholders. I'll now hand back to Chris.
Thanks, Kate. In the next 15 minutes, I want to touch upon five areas. Number one, colleague engagement and customer growth. Number two, what's happening in the U.K. retail market. Number three, how to capture the opportunities in British Gas Energy. Number four, moving on to improving performance levels in British Gas Services & Solutions. Lastly, number five, opportunities to invest in the energy transition. What I've seen over the course of the year makes me more convinced than ever that we have what it takes to deliver the turnaround. Over the past year, our people have started to adopt more of a winning mindset, and I've seen that our passion and determination to succeed is beginning to gain momentum. We have a plan of action underpinned by our purpose, helping you live sustainably, simply and affordably.
A key focus has been on improving colleague engagement across the group from what were unacceptably low levels. As I've said before, I have a very simple view of business. Look after your colleagues, they'll look after your customers, and that will take care of your cash flow, thus looking after your shareholders. I'm therefore really pleased that colleague engagement has increased by 16 percentage points over nine months, up to 55%. It's still not where it needs to be, and it will remain a major area of focus, but it's a super start and something to build on. We also saw an increase in customer numbers overall, including 500,000 customers taken on through Ofgem Supplier of Last Resort process. Last month, we took on an additional 176,000 customers following the collapse of Together Energy.
This is where you see the benefit of our responsible business model, which allows us to be in a strong enough financial position to take these customers on. I hope that through our continued focus on improving the customer experience and our competitiveness, we'll be able to convince our new customers to stay with us for the long term. Value for money is a huge focus for me. We should not be shy about spending money, but we must get value for every pound spent. This focus has allowed us to reduce annual operating costs by around GBP 350 million when you compare it to 2019. What's going on in the U.K. energy retail market? At the 2021 interim results, I spoke about the fact that I suspect some of our competitors were trading while effectively insolvent.
This was confirmed in the second half when global wholesale gas prices rose substantially, leading to increases in U.K. gas and power prices across the curve, as you can see in the top left chart. This increase exposed those suppliers with unsustainable business models, and it resulted in the collapse of 29 companies or more than half the market. As you can see in the top right, we're now back down at slightly over 20 suppliers. As you can see in the bottom left chart, the rapid increase in wholesale prices has led to the default tariff being the cheapest available in the market, with a material reduction in market switching rates as can be seen on the right.
The current situation demonstrates the importance of our responsible business model and a disciplined approach to hedging and risk management, with the capabilities in our Energy Marketing & Trading business proving particularly valuable. We were happy to play our part in supporting 700,000 customers displaced, but we recognize this is a distressing time for those customers. It's a worrying time for all customers, and we are doing everything that we can to help. Onboarding 700,000 customers takes a lot of effort, and I'm really proud of how our teams responded to the challenge, mostly while still working from home. There's a huge regulatory failure which requires urgent intervention and financial services-style prudential regulation, including fit and proper person tests, capital adequacy rules, well-monitored risk management, and protection for customer deposits.
We're frustrated by the slow pace of regulatory change, and therefore, we've decided that we're not going to wait. Kate and I have already passed the FCA fit and proper person test, which was required for us to be involved in our services business. We have a well-established risk management function and very strict separation of duties in our Energy Marketing and Trading team. We've strengthened the balance sheet, and we ensure that we have sufficient capital to weather the ups and downs of our markets. We've voluntarily separated our customer deposits, holding gross customer credit balances in a separate bank account. We believe all energy suppliers should do this, and in reality, they don't need to wait for the regulation to make them do so. The focus of regulation also needs to change.
It needs to be about customer requirements and protection rather than success being measured by customer switching rates. We welcome some of the recent changes and announcements from Ofgem as a step in the right direction. Additional allowances have been made in recent default tariff caps to allow recovery of unexpected costs. Ofgem have also launched proposals to implement additional assessments for energy market participants from the first of April, and a consultation on proposed changes to the supplier license application guidance. We wait to see the exact nature and timing of any changes, and we will continue to engage with Ofgem on the future of retail markets in the U.K. to ensure that well-run, responsible suppliers can make a fair return. My fear is that Ofgem are gonna take too long. Now we hear a lot about responsible investing now.
I hope those responsible investors with stakes in our competitors will use their influence to drive the management teams there to do the same as we've done. We don't finance our operations with our customers' cash. No one should. Until we stop energy suppliers doing this, we run the wholly unacceptable and very real risk of history repeating itself. I should note here that the positive intervention by both the U.K. and the Irish governments to support hard-pressed energy consumers in recent months is very welcome. This is clearly going to put pressure on public finances, and I was really pleased this month to be able to return the GBP 27 million furlough money we received from the U.K. government in 2020.
We were hugely grateful for the support at the start of the pandemic, and now we're hopefully through the worst, it's important that we return those funds. Irrespective of changes to the regulatory environment, we need to continue to modernize and improve performance in British Gas Energy. The U.K. energy supply market is going through rapid change. We're likely to see a substantial increase in electrification, both in heat and in transport. In this changing environment, we need to make sure we can give our customers what they want. This includes flexibility through things such as dynamic time of use tariffs and a better customer experience. This will require us to migrate to a new platform. To this end, we're investing in a lower cost software-as-a-service platform, as Kate mentioned, which combines ENSEK, Amazon, and Salesforce software.
The platform's greater flexibility means we can make changes in minutes and hours rather than weeks and months. We can bring propositions to market quicker and use more agile ways of working. We've now got over 350,000 customers on this platform. The challenge with a migration such as this is to balance the desire to do things quickly with the need to do them properly. We'll continue with a controlled approach to migration as we scale up and migrate all residential and small business customers over time, preparing ourselves for the future, while at the same time driving costs down further. As we do this, we'll maintain a focus on improving the customer experience and our efficiency. Customer Net Promoter Score in energy increased by five points to 14 in 2021.
Although complaints were higher than I would have liked, it can by and large be explained by the energy market disruption in the second half. Cost per customer fell 9% compared to last year to GBP 93. It was 12% lower than we saw in 2019, reflecting the impacts of our focus on value for money. Let's move now to British Gas Services. The opportunities in energy transition are huge. The decarbonization of heat will drive substantial demand for new heating systems. As the largest U.K. installer and servicer of such systems, this is a real opportunity. We believe the U.K. needs a mix of hydrogen and heat pumps to deliver what customers want, and both are huge opportunities. For us, electrification is far more of an opportunity than a threat.
A boiler installation needs four things, an electrical connection, a cold water inlet, a hot water outlet, and a gas supply. A heat pump needs three of those four things. So if you can install a boiler, you can essentially install a heat pump. A massive opportunity. In 2022, we launched our heat pump proposition in Devon, and we plan to take this across the country over the course of this year. Our ambition is to install 20,000 heat pumps a year by 2025, as set out in our climate transition plan launched in November last year. Now we're also the biggest installer of smart meters in the U.K.
These enable customers to understand their energy use and change their behavior, demand flexible tariffs from us, and help with network flexibility. The electric vehicle market is going to be increasingly important, not just the installation of charge points, but the integration of EV solutions into home energy management. Last year, we launched our new Hive-branded EV proposition. There are other improvements we're making to allow us to capture future opportunities. We were already looking to increase the proportion of our sales through direct channels, reducing our reliance on price comparison websites. Now, the collapse of energy switching and the knock-on impact on combined energy and services bundled products has accelerated this process. The way that our commercial team responded was incredible, agile in the truest sense of the word. With the expected increase in demand, we're today making our operations fit for a net zero future.
This includes the implementation of a new planning and dispatch system in partnership with Microsoft, which should be up and running by the end of the year, transforming the scheduling of jobs and allowing us to further improve engineer productivity. Now great though all of this is, it will only work if we retain our customers, and to do that, we need to improve our service levels. This is a key focus area for 2022. We want to improve customer retention rates, which are currently over 80% by investing in and improving our service. You've already seen the performance in 2021 was disappointing due to a number of factors. While the issues are temporary, the bounce back won't be immediate in 2022. In particular, like many employers in the U.K., we have experienced substantially higher absence rates during the pandemic, broadly double historic levels.
As our engineers are in and out of customer homes, they've been more at risk than those who work mostly outside, and I'm really grateful for their selfless efforts. They are only human. Due to work a full week, and then they have to isolate, we are immediately faced with up to 40-50 customer appointments that we need to reschedule. Not only are those customers understandably irritated, but with a workforce reduced through increased absence levels, we may need to have longer lead times. This has been tough on colleagues, and it's been tough on customers. We saw far too many jobs being rescheduled, meaning we let our customers down, and as a result, we saw a significant increase in complaints. I think in general, people were more forgiving, more understanding of service interruptions in the early days of COVID.
as we got into the second half of 2021, I think people were understandably tired of COVID, more frustrated, and I think that's been reflected in part in increased complaints. Now, while these issues, which have continued into 2022, are temporary, we've got plans in place to improve capacity and performance so that when we're back to normal, we can capture the huge opportunities that will come from the energy transition. We've got the largest energy services field force in the U.K. with around 7,000 engineers. Five years ago, we had 9,000. Now, the issue we faced was that our cost per job was between a third and a half more expensive than third-party contractors. When our engineers left, we replaced them with contractors to keep costs down for customers.
While we've got some great contractors, our customers reasonably expected a British Gas engineer to turn up when they book an appointment. I know that I do. That's why we needed to take the actions necessary to lay the foundations of a sustainable and growing services business, and that required the painful process of modernizing terms and conditions to improve our competitiveness and to close the cost per job gap. This meant a really turbulent first half of the year with around 450 engineers choosing not to agree to the new terms and conditions and regrettably leaving Centrica. In addition, we saw other attrition roughly at the same level as we saw in 2018. With our more flexible working practices, we were able to restart engineer recruitment for the first time in many years as you can see here.
We recruited just under 1,500 people into the engineer workforce in only nine months. Our people are truly amazing when you set them a focused task. The 1,500 people we recruited, it was split roughly 40-60 apprentices to qualified engineers. We would have recruited far more, but there is a material shortage of qualified heating engineers in the U.K., and this is where we have a huge competitive advantage. Our award-winning in-house training academies allow us to both train and certify our own apprentices and upskill our engineers to install newer technologies such as EV charging points. We now have over 400 multi-skilled engineer colleagues across heating, smart meters, and EV installation. Now, when you replace an experienced colleague with an apprentice, productivity levels undoubtedly suffer. We know that. But that is a temporary phenomenon.
As you can see, our engineer workforce was withering on the vine. Revitalizing it with apprentices, ex-services personnel, and experienced engineers will set us up well for the future. Great companies grow their own talent. Including the new engineers are over 100 colleagues who worked elsewhere in Centrica, but they wanted to become engineers. Their experience elsewhere in our company will really help in the new roles. These are the engineers who will deliver the U.K.'s net zero future and allow us to capitalize on the opportunities presented by decarbonization. All of the parts of the training journey are in our hands. Our competitors would kill for this. Now, before I close, let me touch briefly on our remaining upstream portfolio and our overall approach to asset ownership.
As I said earlier, we've materially completed our portfolio simplification with the sale of Direct Energy and Spirit Energy Norway. We plan to retain our interest in the remaining Spirit Energy business focused on the U.K. and the Netherlands. We've reduced the carbon intensity of the portfolio, we've stopped exploration, and we've reduced the decommissioning risk. Our new shareholder agreement means the cash flows generated by Spirit will be retained to meet the remaining decommissioning obligation. We will of course continue to invest to maintain safe and reliable operations, and we will decommission our assets responsibly. Spirit is now a mature asset production and decommissioning company. It's no longer an E&P company. There might be more. We've retained optionality for net zero projects. For example, potentially repurposing Spirit Energy assets for capturing and storing carbon.
As you know, we've been looking at the possibility of repurposing Rough so it can act as a hydrogen storage facility. These assets could conceivably become carbon-negative assets and sit nicely alongside our 20% stake in the U.K.'s nuclear fleet, a great source of zero carbon electricity. Looking forward, it's inevitable that the U.K. will have more renewable energy in the future, and this will result in more intermittency in electricity generation, resulting in an increased need for distributed, rapid response, flexible electricity sources, a business that we are already in. We'll continue to assess attractive opportunities to invest in flexible and distributed generation aligned to the energy transition, including gas fire peaking plants and battery storage alongside the work we're doing to ascertain the long-term attractiveness of solar.
To this end, we were successful earlier this month in the Irish capacity auction with our bids to offer up to 200 MW of capacity. We now have the opportunity to build two separate 100 MW gas-fired plants which could support the growth of renewables and maintain stability of energy supply in Ireland. Our strategic focus remains on the customer, but owning assets is consistent with that, helping to de-risk the overall portfolio, utilizing our leading skills in Energy Marketing and Trading to optimize both our own and other people's assets, and providing us with options to benefit from the transition to net zero. Now there are five main things I'd like you to take away from this session. 1, we've made good progress in the journey to turn around Centrica.
We're almost two years in, and there's still a lot to do, but today we're a stronger, more focused company than we were. two, we're well-positioned to manage any challenges the energy crisis may bring. Our leading capabilities in energy procurement and risk management, coupled with our strong balance sheet, mean we're able to support customers through this crisis. three, our focus in 2022 is on driving further significant improvement in our customer service, so we're even better when we fully emerge from COVID. four, the opportunities that I see from the energy transition are huge, and we are incredibly well-placed to capture them. five, finally, everything that we do is focused on driving improved financial performance and adding shareholder value. We look at the long term while managing through the short term.
The actions that we've taken, we may now have a clear path to restart paying dividends soon. I'd like to say thanks for listening, and I really look forward to the Q&A session shortly.