Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Hydrogen One Capital Growth full year results investor presentation. This presentation is scheduled to last for around 45 minutes. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, and if you would give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful.
I'd now like to hand over to Simon Lewis, EMEA Vice Chairman from FTI. Good morning.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Hydrogen One's first full year results presentation. My name is indeed Simon Lewis, and I'm Vice Chairman, EMEA at FTI Consulting. We are Hydrogen One's financial communications advisors. I'm here with Richard Hulf and Dr. J.J. Traynor, the principals of Hydrogen One's investment advisor, who will take you through the presentation. We have a Q&A session after the presentation where we'll be taking online questions from the audience. Just to remind you, the question portal is open now and will be open throughout. Any questions we can't get to during the presentation, we will of course get back to the questioners afterwards. Let me now, without further ado, hand over to Richard.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Richard Hulf. I'm H1 of the team here. I previously was working at Artemis as a fund manager. Just a bit of background, I started my career as a chartered engineer, working with Babcock Power, in the utility sector, so that's sort of come in quite handy today. I went through a conversion, did a master's degree in petroleum engineering, worked for Exxon and spent most of my career so far in the energy sector. I went on from Exxon into the city, worked with Henderson Crosthwaite, in stockbroking, worked with Ernst & Young, and then went through my own sort of research business before joining the dots back up to Artemis.
A very technical background, a lot financial, and sort of mix it up to set up Hydrogen One with JJ Traynor.
Thanks, Richard. Good morning. I'm JJ Traynor. Nice to see everybody, and thanks for joining the webcast. Like Richard, I have a technical background, a degree and PhD in geology in the 1980s, and spent early career with BP doing oil and gas exploration, on their worldwide portfolio. Left BP, in the mid-1990s and joined Deutsche Bank and, was part of the number one ranked, sell side oil and gas team at Deutsche Bank, for about 10 years. Mid-2000s moved to the Netherlands, joined Shell and was in charge of Shell's investor relations and ESG program worldwide, for 11 years, which was a very interesting experience.
Look, I've known Richard Hulf for many years along that journey, and we're just coming up on the second anniversary of Hydrogen One, and we're almost a year now since the IPO. That's me and good to speak to everybody. Let's start the presentation by just having an overview of Hydrogen One itself. We'll take the camera off at this point so that the audience can concentrate on the slides, and then we'll reappear at the end, of course, for the Q&A. Look, Hydrogen One was launched by IPO in the middle of last year. It was the first ever listed fund focused purely on the clean hydrogen economy.
Today we believe it still is the first only fund that offers that to investors. By investing in Hydrogen One, what you get as a public markets investor is access to the clean hydrogen sector right across the OECD and right across the full value chain. Very importantly, you get access to private portfolios. This is a fund that very much focuses on private equity investment, which is otherwise very hard to get access to from the public markets. In that sense, we're democratizing the private equity sector in clean hydrogen. It's a growth proposition, and we're targeting 10%-15% NAV growth over time. It's very much a growth proposition there.
You can see on the slide bottom left, we have a pipeline of investable opportunities for around GBP 500 million today, which is a very large opportunity set from which we're choosing the very best positions to invest on behalf of our shareholders. The fund is backed by INEOS Energy, and INEOS Energy are a great partner for us. They came in for GBP 25 million at the IPO. They have a board seat, and it's really a very fruitful relationship for us to have them involved. G iven the complexity in this industry, we've secured the services of Arup. Arup obviously a globally renowned engineering and consulting firm.
Arup's role with Hydrogen One is to provide due diligence and technical advice to the fund as we deploy shareholder capital. That's an overview of what the fund's all about. What's driving the hydrogen economy? There are really three very significant geopolitical forces here that are driving the demand for clean hydrogen and the very strong growth in this sector. Firstly, of course, energy transition. Fundamentally, this is a clean fuel and really is playing a key role in delivery of net zero and is implicit, embedded in many country policies to implement the Paris Agreement around the world. Energy transition is a major factor here.
Alongside that, air quality, and this is all about getting rid of fossil fuels from heavy transport and power generation, and we firmly believe that the clean hydrogen has a major role to play in that air quality piece. Then thirdly, energy security and tragically in the aftermath of the Russia invasion of Ukraine, energy security is very high on the political agenda, our societal agenda, particularly in Europe. Of course, as renewable power grows in the energy mix, the intermittency of the energy mix rises. Of course, hydrogen, clean hydrogen is a great way to use that surplus renewable power and be part of that energy security piece.
These three very complementary and very powerful forces are all coming together to drive the demand for clean hydrogen and the investment proposition for Hydrogen One. Make some comments on where we get clean hydrogen and just to mention that our website has quite a lot of good background information on the macro and the industry fundamentals if anybody's interested to go a bit deeper on this. Today the hydrogen industry, which is a large industry, is sometimes called the gray hydrogen sector. This is hydrogen that's produced by splitting fossil fuels using a chemical process called steam methane reforming. That's in a lot of ways today's industrial gas sector. It's a big industry. It's actually quite a polluting industry.
Globally the emissions from gray hydrogen, the greenhouse gas emissions from gray hydrogen are about 2 times U.K. annual emissions. A major demand pull for clean hydrogen is actually the cleanup of that gray hydrogen market. Everything else on that chart, blue, turquoise, green and the emerging technologies, those are all clean hydrogen supply sources. These are really all designed to replace gray and then grow hydrogen more broadly in the energy system over time. Blue uses gray hydrogen technologies but with carbon capture and storage. There are a number of projects here in the U.K. that are focusing on blue hydrogen.
Turquoise uses a methane feedstock but splits the methane into hydrogen and solid carbon which can be stored or sold and so resulting of course in a stream of clean hydrogen. Green hydrogen uses renewable power, so solar or wind through electrolysis. This is a very established electrochemical process which splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are clean and both of which can be sold. Most of the activity in Hydrogen One today is in that green and turquoise part of the chart. We are monitoring emerging technologies, particularly in waste to hydrogen. These could become investable for the fund in the future, but we see these as rather high risk and longer term today. That's a bit of background as to supply sources of hydrogen.
Where are we investing in this sector? Look on the left-hand side of the chart. That graphic shows the full value chain of the hydrogen industry. Hydrogen supply top left all the way through to the hydrogen applications, typically fuel cell, at the bottom left of that chart. In between those two bookends, this quite complex environment of storage and distribution and supply chains and the obviously the equipment manufacturers. All of that is in scope for the fund right across the OECD. A full exposure to the full value chain. Very much with an emphasis on hydrogen supply, on the supply chain equipment, and some of those specialist hydrogen applications.
You can see some examples of those themes on the right-hand side of the chart. Broad scope within the clean hydrogen sector and as I say right across the OECD. This is very much an ESG proposition and this is an area that Richard and I are both really passionate about. This is very much an ESG product. Fossil fuels are excluded and fundamentally this is all about deploying capital at scale to deliver the energy transition and obviously getting to a zero carbon future.
We run our ESG policy in four layers assessing the effectiveness of the boards of the companies we're investing in, investing in low carbon growth, ensuring that there are sustainable business practices in all of the things that we're investing in on behalf of shareholders and obviously ESG within your company itself. We've made a lot of progress on this just in the last few months in the early stages of the fund. We've deployed GBP 69 million so far into low carbon growth, avoiding greenhouse gas emissions just in those first few months of the fund is 3,500 tons and we think that's a figure that's gonna grow significantly over time.
Richard and I are representing you as our investors on the boards of all of the private companies that we've invested in to date to ensure good governance. Look with that let me pass you over to Richard as to what we've actually invested in.
Yeah, thanks, JJ. Gonna sort of take you through the way we've been investing capital. It starts with well, very much a specialist fund in a specialist sector. The insights we've got into the hydrogen sector in the first few companies we've invested into, alongside the different investors that we've been working with, have been absolutely fantastic. The growth in our connections has just far exceeded our original expectations. In terms of policy, our investment policy has still been true to only investing into hydrogen companies, hydrogen projects. Don't need to go into emerging markets, OECD mandate, and fossil fuels completely excluded.
JJ's talked to you a bit about the ESG policy. The way that we can really enact ESG not just environmental which is obvious through the zero carbon fuel that we're investing into, but the social and the governance. We really get to influence that on being on the boards of most of the companies we're investing into, looking at supply chain, looking at materials, looking at board diversity, so we can have a great hand in that.
On the transactions, the fact that we've completed six transactions to date is a real testament to the way that the process is working so well between us and our board and the AIFM along with the advisors that JJ mentioned before with Arup. We've got a really efficient process in terms of the way the whole thing's working. Just in terms of the fund itself, we raised GBP 107 million, GBP 102 million net. As JJ said, we've invested GBP 69 million already, and we've just broken it down for you in terms of the geography. That's Germany with Sunfire.
I'll come back to the companies in a moment, and the UK. In terms of the theme, it's about electrolysis, and you'd expect that in the early stages of the new hydrogen sector. We've got to make green hydrogen, as JJ described. To make that, to turn water into energy, which is effectively what we're doing here, splitting that into hydrogen and oxygen, you need electrolysis. We're investing into companies that make electrolyzers. The reverse of the electrolyzer is the fuel cell, and we've started investing into those companies. As JJ said, the asset class is pretty much a private equity fund. A small amount going into listed stocks. Quite an important part, but a very small part of the fund.
What you've seen in terms of NAV movement in the months last year was really just a reflection of the tiny part of the fund that was invested into the listed stocks. What you'll see over the next few months is the influence of the NAV growing through the private investments, just to make that clear. In terms of the timeline, that was GBP 9 million deployed into 19 listed companies. You've seen those in the annual report. Sunfire, GBP 20 million, quite a large investment. That's 20% of AUM. That's sort of a limit to the individual investments that we can make. GBP 10 million into HiiROC, GBP 9 million to NanoSUN. I'll come onto these companies in a moment.
GBP 10 into Bramble, and then just GBP 3 into Gen2 Energy, which is our first sort of project investment. I'll just clarify why that was a small investment, but will get much larger. The most recent announcement that you will have seen is into Cranfield Aerospace. Let's get into the companies themselves. Now, Gen2 Energy, this is our first project investment. It's come a lot sooner than we thought. The whole hydrogen sector is far exceeding our expectations in its maturity and in commercial development. Gen2 is a Norwegian business which is taking advantage of very cheap hydroelectric power. Of course, electricity being the most expensive part of making green hydrogen.
It's then turning that hydrogen, taking it across to the Norwegian coast, compressing it and then exporting it by ship. The key thing here is that it's a small amount of capital into top company, but much larger investments that follow into the individual special purpose vehicles, the SPVs that you see below. We've co-invested into this with Vitol, Huf, and Nelson, and that's sort of a testament to the quality of the investment we're making. Some of you may have seen the investment that Vitol partnered with ITM recently, the sort of downstream part of this whole fuel chain. Gen2, that's GBP 3 million into top co.
700 MW worth of development to come in the SPVs, which is about $500 million. Sunfire was our first investment into a solid oxide electrolyzer maker. Well-established business based in Dresden. You can see by how well-established we mean by 270 staff, backed by Neste and SMS, again investing a lot alongside well-known other investment funds. Just recently a pretty decent investment from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which also reflected in a decent size order for the company. For us, this is about investing into companies that are scaling up their businesses, scaling up to second or third factory, new production lines.
I'm very, very pleased with the Sunfire investment. We put GBP 10 million into HiiROC. This is worth talking about. A great team led by Tim Davies. What they're doing is they're taking that ingenious HiiROC unit there, and they're splitting methane into hydrogen and carbon. The carbon that gets produced is carbon black, a very pure form of carbon that can be used in other industrial processes, such as tire making, carbon fiber and reinforcing building materials. Hence the other co-investors with us. Centrica will be needing to produce large amounts of hydrogen to start putting into the national grid over the next few years. People like Hyundai and Kia using the carbon black to put into their tire businesses.
The proceeds here went into sort of the certification, the scale-up of the manufacturer of those HiiROC units. That's a great business that we're really pleased with. NanoSUN, led by Dean O'Connor and the team up in Lancaster, got quite a bit of publicity during COP26, where they were refueling a bus that was running from London up to Glasgow. The real advantage of the NanoSUN technology is if you look at the comparable way of moving hydrogen around in existing cylinders, it's much cheaper to get a 145 unit, which is what we're showing down there in the bottom part of that photograph.
This is akin to the way we're currently moving petrol and diesel around. It's. We still move it by tankers. That unit there has got enough to refuel about 190-200 vehicles. So that gets taken to site, used, run at 500 bar inside the cylinders, down to 150 bar inside vehicles and applications. It's that technology which is the real selling point of the NanoSUN units. Bramble Energy, the team led by Tom Mason, are making a fuel cell, and they're making it from a patented process using printed circuit boards material. Most of the fuel cells and electrolyzers that we all see in industry are made through steel and fabrication.
Obviously there's advantages of the PCB in being much lighter. The portable power unit there that Bramble are gonna start manufacturing and selling is made possible by the lightness of the PCB materials. We're invested into this with, again, a group of well-known investors, IP Group, British Growth Fund and so forth. Really keen to see what happens with the Bramble ideas over the next few years into vehicles and in portable power applications. We've also invested into Cranfield Aerospace, but JJ is gonna take you through that one.
Yeah. Richard, thanks. Cranfield Aerospace is our most recent investment. Just to stand back one, decarbonization of flight is one of the big challenges I think for society in terms of delivery of the energy transition, and there's a lot of different ideas and concepts as to how to do that. We and I think others around us firmly believe that hydrogen with fuel cell is the way to decarbonize turboprop flight. This is basically using hydrogen fuel, using a fuel cell on board to convert that into electricity, and then obviously driving the propellers with an electrical motor. We've teamed up with an aerospace company called Safran to invest in Cranfield Aerospace to absolutely deliver that.
Cranfield Aerospace is a very specialist company. They've got a fantastic track record in terms of certifying, so developing the aerospace technologies and actually getting them off the bench and certifying them for commercial use with the CAA and other regulatory bodies around the world. It's that certification step that we really think Cranfield can bring here. What Cranfield are doing is a project that's called Project Fresson. You can see the graphic on the left-hand side of the chart. Project Fresson is all about getting an established commercial airframe, the Britten-Norman Islander, and converting that into hydrogen fuel cell for flight and going through a series of engineering and regulatory steps to make that happen.
The Britten-Norman Islander is a widely used short-haul, commercial airframe. If anybody on the call has been on holidays to the Scilly Islands or live in the Scilly Islands, you will have probably flown on a Britten-Norman Islander to make that journey. That will be the P hase I of this company. Once this technology is established and certified, of course, the turboprop market globally is very big, potentially a GBP 1 billion-plus total market. We're very enthusiastic about this investment, and we think this has got tremendous growth potential for our investors. Last slide from us and then delighted to get into the Q&A.
What we've described here is a very dynamic and very strongly growing sector, but at the same time a sector that has a good deal of complexity to it. We firmly believe that a specialist approach is the way to unlock value for shareholders in this industry, a specialist approach and a diversified portfolio, so multiple positions obviously within the clean hydrogen space. It's all about deploying capital at scale for energy transition. We don't talk about net zero in this fund. We talk about net negative, so this is all about avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, and obviously it's about financial performance. This is a growth proposition with 10%-15% per year growth targets over time.
We're just coming up on a two-year anniversary of the company, or one year since the IPO. The IPO proceeds, we expect those to be fully deployed somewhere in the Q2 of this year, and that's really the context for the small fundraise that we completed last week, and thanks very much to anybody who participated in that. The pipeline that we have on the table is GBP 500 million. 200 or so of that is in developer companies and supply chain companies, the sort of thing we've already invested in. Over time, we see another GBP 300 million of pipeline in the supply projects themselves.
A lot of exciting things to go for with the fund, and really we would say the first year of the fund is very much the beginning. Look, with that, perhaps, Simon, over to you to host us through the Q&A.
Thank you very much, JJ. Thank you, Richard, for that very clear and interesting presentation. Just to recap, we'll go to the Q&A session now. We've got an eye on the questions coming in. We won't be able to get to all the questions, but we commit to respond to all the questions submitted. So let's kick off with the first question. I think, Richard, to you first. I think people will be interested to hear a bit more about how involved you're gonna be in the companies in which you invested. You said in the presentation that taking a board seat in pretty much every case is what you do. Tell us a bit more about how you plan to oversee the operations-
Yeah.
of the companies that you invest in.
Yeah, yeah, good question. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We're pretty insistent that we want to have board seats in all the companies that we invest into, and that has definitely been the case. What's been quite surprising is that the board meetings are monthly. We spend a lot of time involved in the business of everything we've invested into. We're able to start talking about the milestones in some cases that we've set for these companies they know they've got to reach. We've been impressed by how seriously they take that right through the all of the staff or level.
Some companies typically have sort of 30 to 50 to 100 staff. Yeah, it's great to be involved.
JJ, do you want to add anything to that?
Well, I think just to say the ESG aspects are very important to us. Ultimately the plan is that we will help these companies to sell themselves through an IPO or through some sort of trade sale. To get them to a state where they're saleable so they can achieve the best valuation for our investors, the implementation of ESG is very important. That's something which we very firmly bring to those companies with our track records and backgrounds in that space.
Okay. Next question, Richard, again maybe coming to you on this one.
Mm-hmm.
It's about valuations.
Yeah.
It's fair to say that listed hydrogen shares like Ballard and ITM Power have been quite volatile.
Yeah.
Why is that? What are the valuations like in the private asset classes?
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot in there. Let's take the listed companies first of all. I think there's a bit of a gap in understanding about what's in the listed hydrogen businesses and how do you value them. The hydrogen sector tends to track the S&P Global Clean Energy Index. They're pretty much seen as clean tech companies. We see them as energy companies. We think there's a bit of a misunderstanding which will eventually correct itself. There's also very short-term expectations from listed companies. They have to produce results, predictable revenues and earnings on a quarterly basis. They're simply not doing that.
Even some of the larger companies you mentioned, Ballard and ITM, start to bed down their joint ventures, you'll start to see smoother, steadier earnings and revenues to go with it. For us, that's not really the focus of the fund. It's interesting for us to see insights into how those companies are performing on what they're doing and how the market thinks about valuation, because there'll be quite a few private companies that we will eventually IPO over the next two-five years. The way we value private companies and the way the private sector sees itself is quite different. It's very much based on discounted cash flows, looking at net asset values.
I think to address another question that I saw earlier, yes, the process is audited. It's audited on an annual basis by KPMG. We have very strict in-house modeling policies which are overseen by the board and by the AIFM as well. It's very much about taking raw data on costs and revenues from the companies we invest into, projecting those over a number of years, and then starting to look at what market share that those businesses can start to gain as a basis for longer term financial projections going forward.
Great. JJ, can I come to you next on U.K. hydrogen policy? I mean, clearly COP26 gave a major boost, and we've actually seen two U.K. government announcements. It's a much more front-of-mind area of development in public policy terms. I think investors will be interested to know what you think that policy change means in terms of implications for hydrogen.
Well, well, let me have a go. I mean, around the world, I think we're running at 39 countries now who have set hydrogen policies as part of delivery of Paris commitments to net zero. Typically these policies are around a target for what proportion of the energy mix or how many megawatts, how many gigawatts clean hydrogen should be providing. There's a regulatory piece the HSSE and so forth that goes around those sorts of projects. Then crucially the funding, so how much government funding and what are the funding mechanisms that are in place to make all that happen. That's the global picture.
I think we would say around the world, Japan, South Korea, EU, California, other regions and countries that have the most advanced policy formation. The U.K. has been lagging in this area. There were a series of announcements last week, I think really as a reaction to the Ukraine situation, which were aimed to address that balance. What we've seen in the U.K. is the 2030 target for clean hydrogen moving up from 5 GW to 10 GW, so kind of doubling it, yeah. Actually if you look at the publications that the BEIS have put out, so BEIS is the government that's looking after this. On BEIS' numbers, there's actually double that.
There's 20 gigawatts of clean hydrogen projects under discussion in the U.K. today. There's a big opportunity set, and there's a lot more ambition now in the target. The piece that's missing in all of that is the business model and the funding package. Consultations are just concluding, just closing out with industry and investors as to what the appropriate funding and funding policy should be in the U.K. Frankly, Simon, we've been saying that for a while, and we're obviously kind of waiting for that key piece, and that is an important element to get the U.K. hydrogen policy moving. Keep an eye on 2023. We talked a lot about 2030 and the aspiration.
In 2023, the government is going to take a view as to how much hydrogen can be blended with the natural gas grid. Look, I'm from the 1960s, right? I don't know where you come from, Simon.
Well, cool.
At that time, coal gas was widely used in the U.K., so coal gasification, and I think the older people on the call will remember gas tanks and so on. Coal gas was actually 20% hydrogen, and that was widely shipped and distributed in the natural gas networks. Keele University have just closed out a series of very good studies in conjunction with Northern Gas Networks to understand how much hydrogen today's natural gas grids can take, and guess what? It's around 20%. Next year, government may well authorize that 20% blending, which will be a real kickstart for the clean hydrogen system in this country. It very much comes back to why we made that investment in HiiROC, which you'd mentioned.
HiiROC manufacture absolutely critical components for that hydrogen blending piece.
Richard, do you wanna add anything on this?
Yeah, the other interesting thing is the diversified use of the carbon that comes out of that HiiROC process, actually a very useful component into reinforcing building materials. We're aware of one U.K. house builder that will be buying HiiROC units because it builds about 16,000 homes a year. These new sites, they will have vehicle recharging in every house. They'll also have hydrogen boilers built into every house. The HiiROC units will be supplying the hydrogen, and the carbon there, interestingly, they're taking and putting into their building materials division, sort of reinforcements. Yeah, it's a very sort of holistic approach.
There's a quick follow-up question, JJ, which is: Does it matter that the U.K. is 18 months behind the U.S.?
Well, it matters if the U.K. wants to deliver energy security, air quality improvement, and targets for net zero. If all those things matter, and I think those are themes that resonate with most people in the U.K., then yes, it absolutely matters.
It doesn't matter from the fund perspective because it's a global fund.
Yeah. Good point. Yeah.
We are investing into mainland Europe, which is well ahead on hydrogen policy. We obviously wanna support British businesses where we can, but this is a global fund, so it's European investing, North American investing, Asia-Pacific investing.
Now, not surprisingly, there's been a couple of questions on Cranfield Aerospace, 'cause that's an amazing story and fascinating. Project Fresson, JJ, you described, you talked about the potential for the turboprop sort of sector. A couple of questions about what might be the next step in terms of commercial flights beyond that.
It's a very short answer. Paul Hutton and the team are aiming for a certified airframe on that Britten-Norman solution in 2025.
Wow.
Simple as that. I think this is something that that's coming down the tracks much more quickly than the public perhaps appreciate.
It's worth making the point, though, when you talk about commercial flight, it's about getting an airframe certified through the CAA. There are lots of aircraft companies we looked at who are doing one-offs. What's important is that the first company that gets an airframe certified. This is why Safran are working with us. We rely upon their industry technology to tell us that this is the right company to invest into. Because once they crack the airframe, which is the Britten-Norman Islander, then all of those aircraft can be converted to hydrogen, and then we've got an industrial scale-
Yeah
... investment that we can pursue.
Well, if we could change subjects. JJ, do you want to turn to the terribly tragic situation in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Clearly, given the sector you're in, there must be some implications for this, for the energy sector and specifically for hydrogen. Perhaps you might like to make a few comments about that.
Well, look, obviously a terrible situation in Ukraine and just a poor context of the question actually. I think if you stand back and look at the history of the energy system and customers want stable sources of energy, they want low-cost energy, they want it delivered to them reliably. It's never been wise to rely on one particular form of energy or be overly reliant on a single source of supply. All the way through the history of the energy industry, diversity of supply is a very important theme, sometimes called security of supply. Again, if you...
Yes, Simon, I know you probably remember the 1970s and the three-day weeks and the empty board shops and all those things, and there's a classic example of over-reliance on relatively few suppliers. I think what you're seeing today is a policy response at a political level in Europe, in North America, and actually other parts of the world. Japan, I think, is rather affected by this as well. This is really around diversity of supply. There's an awakening, I think, in the political classes that this doesn't happen quickly. That the frequency to go from a a concept in energy to actually delivering scale energy is a multiple years story.
One of the reactions which we're seeing, and we're gonna continue to see, is an increased focus on domestic forms of energy. If you like, take away the political angle here. Here in the U.K., I mean, the energy policies that were refreshed last week talked a lot about more investment in nuclear, more investment in fossil, more investment in renewables and hydrogen. I think it's that emphasis on domestic that we're going to see. That's not always good news for customers. P rice is a factor in here.
Specifically to the hydrogen sector, renewable power is already growing quickly in the energy mix, and it's gonna grow even more quickly as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As renewable power grows in the energy mix, the intermittency of the energy mix is also going to increase because wind goes up and down and sun goes up and down. Hydrogen with electrolysis or renewables with electrolysis is a very good way of using that surplus renewable power and storing it as hydrogen in salt caverns or in tanks or in pipelines, and then sending it out more broadly into the energy system.
It's a very difficult thing to say, but unfortunately, the political environment now is actually much more positive for renewables and hydrogen than perhaps it was in the recent past.
Thank you. Richard, anything you want to add to that?
There might be people out there thinking, "Well, that all sounds quite sort of theoretical," but we are actually seeing projects that are like that. W e're looking at salt cavern projects. Caverns being in the U.S. at the moment to the point of U.K. being a... We're a little bit stuck in the U.K. with U.K. policy. If you look more broadly internationally, we're already seeing these projects and we're gonna have to start scaling up the whole fundraising process as these projects are getting bigger and they're starting up and they're looking at FID within the next sort of like 12 months in some cases.
Mm.
There's a bit of a frustration that there's a mindset that thinks that hydrogen's coming tomorrow, but this fund is really investing into these things today.
We are actually sadly coming towards the end of the Q&A session, so we've probably got time for a couple more questions. I might try and squeeze one more in after that, but I'm conscious that we are coming to the end of the session. Again, just to repeat, we will come back to every one of you who has asked questions. Maybe let's look ahead a bit, and I'd be interested to hear from both of you on this. The next 12 months, obviously we've got the annual report, but just give us a sense of how the next 12 months look for Hydrogen One, both yeah, but in the kind of the broad strategic level.
Yeah.
Richard?
Yes. Well, it's first thing, deploy the remaining funds.
Yep.
We need to refill up and we need to do two more fundraising. We need to continue building out and high-grading the pipeline of companies and projects. I think we'll see more projects coming onto that list as time goes on. We'll concentrate on the monthly movers for the companies and projects to ensure ultimately NAV growth through monitoring the companies and projects. From what we've seen so far for example, with the orders that Sunfire's already achieved that all seems to be on track.
We're currently sort of firefighting on the best opportunities that we're seeing on our doorstep in the U.K. and on mainland Europe. We need to start expanding the team, so we'll be doing that as fundraising goes on to get us into more markets, which will include North America, U.S. and Canada, and Asia-Pacific, developed Asia-Pacific, so known South Korea and Japan and Australia.
JJ, anything you want to add to that as well?
Well, I think.
For the fund?
Yeah. Just to add for the shareholders, I mean, we publish our NAV daily, and that reflects the movement in the listed parts of the fund. We publish the NAV quarterly, and that reflects the listed piece and the larger private piece. What the shareholders are seeing currently is really the purchase price of the private investments. It's, of course, a bookkeeping entry as to the price we paid to get into those 6 private positions. Now, of course, across this year and into 2023, we expect to see those NAVs fundamentally growing, as those companies start to deliver with the investment that we put in. The shareholder experience should be seeing those NAVs building over time and remember the growth targets that we've set for ourselves.
Well, sadly, this will have to be the last question now. It's an interesting one. Question is, it's been quite a journey since the launch of Hydrogen One. Has anything particularly surprised either of you over the last 12 months? And is there anything, it doesn't look as though it does, but anyways, is there anything that keeps you awake at night as you think about the future? There's a nice big open-ended question on which to finish.
Let me have a go.
Go on.
Let me have a go and start on that. The number of private companies that we've seen has far exceeded our expectations from what we outlined at the beginning. Obviously, when people know that you've got capital to invest, they'll come and find you. That's been a great surprise. That linked together with the projects we've been investing into just how soon the projects are starting up. With Gen2 Energy, we're looking at FID before the end of the year on the first project. It's the link between those private companies and projects which has also surprised us and just what we saw in the oil and gas sector where we were before, just how connected the whole space is.
As a first mover into this space, how we're seeing the best opportunities.
You haven't said whether there's anything that keeps you awake at night.
Well, I'm sleeping fairly well, actually. It's the same old stuff. We've got to grow the team more rapidly to address this huge growth in the market that we're seeing, which is way exceeding our expectations of real companies and real assets to invest into. It's all on track and it's going well.
JJ, the last word to you.
Oh, I think, I mean, we both have children, but I'm actually quite concerned on a personal level that society is not moving quickly on climate change. I think there's a lot of sort of top-down policy and grand aspirations and so on. But 2050 is not far away, guys, and we're running out of options here. So I think the whole momentum of climate change really needs to pick up the pace here. That actually something that concerns me the most.
The first part of the question, anything particularly surprised you in the first 12 months of this journey?
Scale of the opportunity. We had 56 companies in the hopper at the IPO, private companies. Now I think as of this morning, we have 153. This sector continues to surprise in terms of the number of opportunities, the quality of the opportunities and the growth that's happening.
Well, that is a great note on which to end this Q&A session. Thank you both very much. Mark, I'm gonna hand back to you briefly.
That's great. Simon, JJ, Richard, thank you very much indeed. As Simon previously said, obviously all the questions that have been submitted can be accessed by the company post today's meeting, and we'll publish responses, where it's appropriate to do so and notify you when they're ready for your review. JJ, Richard, I know investor feedback is particularly important to you both and I'll shortly redirect investors to give you their thoughts and expectations. Before doing so, I wondered if I may just hand back just for a few closing comments, just to wrap up with.
Yeah, thanks. Thank you to everybody, genuinely, for taking your time to come and listen to us and the results. I hope we're conveying to you that we're off to a great start. Things are exceeding our expectations, and we're looking forward to a really exciting remainder of 2022 and beyond. Look for scale and success from Hydrogen One. Thanks very much.
That's great. Simon, JJ, Richard, thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Hydrogen One Capital Growth plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good morning to you all.