I'll kick off the next session on the future of renewables. I'm George Kay. I'm part of the infrastructure team at GIC in London, and welcoming our panelists. I've got Miguel, who is CEO of EDP and EDPR. He's been the CEO since 2021, and prior to that was the CFO. And I think you've been with EDP for nearly two.
20 years.
Yeah, more than 20 years. So it's a long stint. And then before that with UBS. And Martin has also been with SSE for quite a period of time as well, and is currently the Chief Commercial Officer and is also Main Board Director of SSE. So welcome to both of you. Maybe I could just start off with Miguel, just on the past few years. I mean, we've seen quite a lot of turmoil in the energy market, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how you're seeing the energy transition globally progressing.
I think the energy transition as a whole continues to progress. I mean, you see still record numbers or record values being invested on a global basis, particularly if you include China as well, which is continuing to invest very heavily. However, I think the key issue is you continue to have to scale up significantly more if we are to get anywhere close to the triple renewables or anywhere close to some of the targets by 2030. So I think it's a little bit of, yes, it's accelerating. Yes, there's a lot that's being done. But if we take the targets seriously, there's a lot more that still needs to be done to scale up. And obviously, over the last couple of years, we've had a significant amount of volatility, whether it's in energy prices and interest rates and supply chains.
There's a bunch of things that also influence that. And also, as we heard just previously, permitting, licensing, I mean, all of these things are sort of contributing to, let's say, to keep the energy transition from maybe scaling up as much as we think it should. I think collectively, I'm not saying even as a company, but just collectively. And so, yeah, so I'd say glass half full, half empty. But clearly, there's a lot more that needs to be done to really progress it more.
Yeah, thank you. Martin, I'd be interested to hear your views on the same.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all well adjusted to energy markets being pretty volatile. I mean, we've been in cycles for 25 years, up and down, and sometimes boom and sometimes not quite so much boom. It feels like in this space at the moment, it's not just a question of where the gas price is, where the spark spread is, where the carbon price is. It's a question of where input metal prices are. It's a question of where policy is. It's a question of actually the logistical and practical capabilities that Andy talked about very fluently, I thought, in terms of delivering all of that. I guess I'm probably an optimist. I think I'm probably well known for being optimistic about most things, so I might as well just state it.
So you've got this cycle going on, and then over the top of it, you've got this amazing kind of green trend, which I think ultimately trumps pretty much everything. And I mean, Miguel just mentioned, I mean, I think it was 460 GW of renewable capacity were delivered globally last year. I think the year before, it was something like 300-something. Huge growth, a lot of that in China. Half of that in China, absolutely. But it's not like every other major economy is not sitting there trying to work out how they also deliver those ambitions in, frankly, breakneck speed. And I think one of the things we think a lot about in SSE is that there seems to be a slight disconnect between supply chain and maturing, let's call it growing pains in the industry, and heightened political ambition. And the ambition keeps going up.
That's a good thing. The supply chain logistics, the practical realities may be a little bit more slower to resolve. But ultimately, I think that probably comes together, and industry is working very hard to do that. But sure, a lot of volatility, but also a lot of opportunity.
It was interesting what you just said earlier about China, because I think there's a view that it could actually have peaked in their...
On past peak emissions.
Peak emissions, which would be pretty incredible, considering they're still building coal plants.
Yeah.
But the rollout of solar is phenomenal.
But their coal plants are performing a little bit like, actually, frankly, some of our gas plants are in the U.K. right now. They're sitting there as reserve, strategic reserve, enabling security of supply, while renewables come over the top and take a bigger market proportion. I think you're going to see that continue. It's interesting. I think we were both at COP. COP was there. I'm sure you were there as well on the day that they announced the tripling of renewables ambition. My first thought was, that's fantastic. How can you not be excited about that? My second thought was, how are we going to deliver it? Where's the supply chain? Where are the people? Exactly what Andy just spoke about. But it is doable. We've just got to go through this maturing process.
I think the other thing with the renewables is actually so far down the cost curve, that's actually probably the cheapest way to deliver a lot of the energy.
Right. So I mean, just for interest, kind of anecdotally, 5.5 years ago, 6 years ago, 5.5 years ago, I had the pleasure of opening Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm off the north coast of Scotland. Prince Charles, as he was then, now the King, helped us open that. That was the largest turbines anyone had deployed in British waters at the time, 7 MW. Within 3 months, we're bidding twice the size of the machines at Dogger Bank for about a third of the price. And the point that Andy made about policy certainty and stability drives real, very transformative change, which can unlock a bunch of value. I absolutely believe to be the case. We've seen it in offshore wind. We've definitely seen it in solar. We're seeing it in batteries now.
I think ultimately, as we go to the harder parts of the energy transition to get to, maybe that's carbon capture, maybe that's hydrogen, we have to accept there's going to be a few expensive projects along the way, but ultimately, we will drive down the cost curve.
By the way, we just energized the 40 MW turbine this week. So it's the largest commercial turbine that's actually working now in the U.K.
But also, you've raised quite a lot of capital last year for EDPR. And I mean, you've got a massive program. I mean, both of you have massive programs. Maybe you can talk about some of the program you've got coming up in the next few years.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we definitely see a tremendous amount of investment opportunities, and that continues to be a reality still as of today. The dynamics have also shifted over time, and I think that's also one of the interesting things about having a sort of a global footprint. We're clearly seeing the U.S. really powering up, very much driven by the big tech and sort of that search for green power, additionalities, sort of actually getting those megawatts. And so for us, we see that as becoming a seller's market. And I've spoken about that in sort of the last couple of weeks and months. But for the first time, we're getting multiple inbound calls for the project. So it's not us bidding a project into an RFP. It's getting calls from whether it's Meta, Google, or Amazon or whatever, saying, you have a project, can we take it?
So we're being able to arbitrate that. That's driving much higher PPA prices. It's driving much higher returns. I think the U.S. is certainly in a very good place now. We can discuss politics later in relation to what happens. Certainly for onshore wind and solar, I don't think that will be impacted by politics, because that's driven very much at the state levels. As I say, by these sort of corporate PPAs and big tech looking for green power. Tremendous opportunity there. Europe, we continue to see, depends on the countries. Clearly, given the war in Ukraine and everything that happened post that, Europe came out with a really strong package in terms of recommendations and legislations.
I think that's having to filter down to the national governments and to be transposed, because it's not enough to say at the European level. Once that gets pushed down, I think that will speed up things. There are things like the recommendation to shorten to two years the maximum licensing period, things like the one-stop shop. All of that still needs to be transposed in a lot of member states. Even independently of that, and so going to your point, I think these things will converge. Independently of that, you are seeing the countries really begin to push forward or to accelerate the build-out, in some cases doing things like continuing to run auctions, but at higher prices. What you're seeing is a lot of these auctions are not getting fully subscribed. There then becomes the question of getting the projects.
The politicians are asking for more power running these auctions. They've increased the prices, but the number of projects that are bidding in is still not increased enough to sort of close that supply and demand. But anyway, I think that's a question of time.
It's interesting seeing Microsoft and Amazon and others, because we're seeing it on the data center side, and you guys are benefiting from it, where we're just getting massive demand. Our utilities in the U.S., they've never seen the load growth like they've had. So then we can sort of you guys can really feed into that with a lot of the development. In the U.K., how do you sort of see it?
I mean, there's a few things. I mean, probably Marco actually will probably correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure EMR in the UK is about 13-14 years old. So that's when I would say the renewables market really started in the UK. If you'd said 14 years ago, we'd have been in a position, as Miguel's just outlined, where you have consumers queuing up to look for CPPAs to do genuine additionality. You have electrification processes. You have an established carbon price. You have a CBAM policy. You have the EU talking about renewables acceleration zones and overriding public interest on planning, et cetera, et cetera. You would have thought that's almost impossible to imagine in 14 years.
The fact that generally, particularly I'm more expert in the UK than I am in Europe, but you've seen policymakers adjust the policy when they haven't quite got the outcome they were looking for actually quite quickly. So we can all complain about the AR5 offshore auction round in the UK, but it only took them several months to change the price. Maybe it wasn't enough. We'll see through AR6. But they do show this willingness and intent to be pragmatic to achieve policy goals. And this is a market that's just maturing. We've relied historically on government interventions to get mechanisms away. There is clearly a shift to corporate interest producing the same demand that we can all build against. And you're right, we're all enjoying that as a positive wave for some of our investments.
It hasn't quite come over to the UK like it is in the US just yet, but we are starting to sign up CPPAs. We are starting to talk to the sort of companies Miguel mentioned in terms of looking for longer-term power agreements. Our sense is that that trend is just it kind of feels relatively unstoppable to us. There are certain jurisdictions, clearly, where things are a little bit tighter, where maybe that dynamic is just a bit more accelerated. I'm particularly thinking of our operations in Ireland, where the market is genuinely tight. As a consequence, corporates are very, very willing to look at contractual structures and term lengths, which did not exist in our imaginations just a couple of years ago.
Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it? And maybe you could just touch on sort of inflation. I mean, Andy was talking about it in terms of hiring and supply chain and things, but also we've had higher interest rates. I mean, we've kind of come from an environment where it's been so incredibly low and easy to get long-term debt. How have you sort of found the markets for funding projects?
Yeah, so we've talked about being fully funded out to 2027. I mean, obviously, we've got a lot of big projects also in transmission underway. So we haven't found issues with that at all. We think we have the same suite of options that Andy mentioned. I thought the people point was really interesting. Completely agree with that. I was at a dinner a while ago where someone talked about grid needing 500 people in Scotland for transmission, us needing 500 people, ScottishPower needing 500 people. Where are these people going to come from? I think the industry has worked very, very hard on apprentices, graduates, and growing that supply chain for people. So that's maybe why we feel in an okay position right now collectively. But clearly, we're going to have to train a lot of people.
In Scotland, where a lot of our stuff is based, we have the advantage of clearly being near an oil and gas sector, which is well-trained in engineering and operations. That's a good place for us to recruit from as well. So there's a just transition edge there too. I don't think anybody thinks this is particularly easy, and we all kind of know there's going to be surprises along the way. But I can only really speak for SSE. It feels like we can, well, we can certainly deliver the plans we've laid out, and we can resource, more importantly, the engineering and operational skills required.
Yeah. How do you see it, Miguel?
I mean, on our side, so in funding, we raised some equity last year. We continue to, obviously, access the debt market, but also our asset rotation strategy. We continue to execute that. I mean, just last week, we sold a portfolio in Italy, again, more than EUR 2 million per megawatt. We haven't seen the capital gains yet, but I think they'll be sizable. So I think it's a good sign that we continue to be able to create value. And that's also one of the things that continues to fund, allow us to fund. So we rotate some of these assets and help use that to drive it forward. In terms of inflation, I mean, clearly, I feel the supply chain has cooled down.
I mean, there was a period there where it was a huge amount of uncertainty about two years ago or up to sort of beginning of this year. I think if you look at the solar side, solar panels have come down dramatically, I mean, brutally. I think the cost of a solar power plant nowadays, it's not the cost of the panels. The panels could go to zero. It probably wouldn't make that much difference. It's really the cost of the people, or the people, or the actual building, the BOS or the BOP. That's the cost. If you can automate that, that's where you then start getting efficiencies, because you're getting solar panels, what, at $0.11, $0.12, $0.13 a watt peak. So that's incredibly cheap. On the wind side, I mean, price is more or less stable, but certainly not going up.
I think there is, well, it'll be interesting to see how that dynamic about the turbine manufacturers develops. But I'd say I think they've gone through a very tough time, as everybody knows, whether it's Vestas or Siemens, et cetera. So I think they're trying to get their P&L and balance sheet back into shape. And so prices have not come down as much, but on the solar side, it's been dramatic.
Pretty incredible.
Just one point about offshore. I mean, obviously, we are in our own kind of Dogger Bank projects at the moment, which has proved to be perhaps a little bit harder than we initially thought we were set out in terms of delivery. So that's slightly gone backwards. What is striking about doing those sort of projects compared to maybe even a few years ago is if there's one part of the supply chain that's difficult, it affects the whole project, and it's quite difficult to replace. And I think for a lot of people involved in offshore wind, it's been the heavy lifting vessels and, frankly, their scarcity. So if you have one issue there, then obviously it's going to affect and have ramifications through the entire project. So maybe that side of the market feels a little bit tight. HVDC was mentioned earlier as well.
Other parts of the supply chain seem to us to be loosening, but it's almost we all need to focus on the bit. You've got to have all of it working for all of it to go seamlessly.
I think one of the things there is also the sector maturing and starting to build in more contingencies and actually pricing in some of those issues.
So we had one of our projects, we had a pile run, and you had booked the vessel and you had the monopile to go in. And once you lose it, your vessel's disappearing and you have not no monopile to install. So there's a real problem with that.
We learned this on Seagreen, where we had an issue with a vessel and you couldn't get a—I mean, I think there were three vessels in the world that could do the job. So our solution was to commission a vessel, which then had a typhoon hit it. So things happen in big projects. But you're right, the risk understanding and the cost of that risk and the contingency provision is important for all of us in that.
It's probably one of the advantages you've had, or you should have been very conservative in your COD dates and costings and things like that when you bid projects.
Yeah, so we've, I mean, Dogger Bank's obviously the big project that people talk about. And of course, that has been slightly delayed. We've consistently said, despite the delays, despite the slight overruns, we'd still make the same returns we expected at FID. And that is probably that conservatism and prudence in the business model. But also these things, there's always ups and downs, isn't there? So we talked about some of the inflationary effects, but some of the inflationary effects, of course, fed through to energy markets. So pre-commissioning revenues are perhaps worth a little bit more. So some of these risks, there are natural mitigations in projects that offset them.
Yeah. Miguel, maybe you could just talk about the floating offshore wind, because it's sort of an area where EDPR via Ocean Winds has really made great strides compared to a lot of kind of fixed bottom installation.
I mean, we have a lot of most of our portfolios bottom-fixed sort of turbines, and so the sort of more standard. But we did start developing a decade ago, some 10 years ago, floating. And so we did a pre-commercial project. It's actually about 25 MW off the coast of Portugal. We have one in France. And there's actually a larger project off South Korea, which is probably the more advanced one, sort of already large scale. I'd say, obviously, it's more expensive because it's earlier stage, but the turbines are the same. And I think really the trick, and this is one of the things that people are grappling with, it can be built on land and then just towed out.
So the issue, for example, in terms of vessels, you don't need the really complex vessels because it can all be done in dry docks and then pushed out. So what you need is to really industrialize the platforms, the floating platforms, because the turbine, as I say, is pretty much the same for all of them. So that's something that we're working on. And hopefully, probably South Korea will be the first project to actually where we take an FID sometime in the next 12-18 months.
Hopefully also that's an area that can scale more. There's more sites.
Yeah, because I mean, obviously, bottom-fixed, you can do it up to maybe 50, 60 meters, or depending nowadays if you do a little bit more.
62 meters.
62.
We can really do for now. And floating, you can do it pretty much anywhere. You can anchor it. And so, for example, all off the coast of California, we have a project there, even places like Japan, obviously, Korea. I mean, obviously, Iberia, because it's got a very deep seabed. So it opens up a lot of new markets.
I mean, so we've got early developments in Japan. I mean, Japan really needs offshore wind. I mean, it's absolutely critical given the demand growth that METI is now predicting against the nuclear situation there. And they can't keep importing gas and coal, clearly, as a G7 economy. If they're going to get to 40 GW, they're into floating, and they're into floating in big style, at great scale. Obviously, Scotland has its own ambitions through the ScotWind auctions as well. And it just feels like this is a technology that's coming. And we mentioned GB Energy earlier. Maybe this is something that GB Energy could look at helping seed fund to attract a bit more private capital to produce those effects that I described, Beatrice to Dogger Bank, double the turbine size for a third of the cost.
I mean, that is possible in this space.
This technology can, I mean, we've tested it out in the Atlantic with 20-meter waves. It survives multiple winters. So it's already a relatively tested technology. It's not something which is like just a prototype or something.
Yeah. Maybe I can just pivot a little bit to the politics. Andy started, and I think we see Europe kind of pivoting right. The French elections were kind of interesting. I mean, they seem to have a mandate to sort of reduce some of the renewable investments that's going on. I'd be curious to sort of know whether you sort of feel that's going to how that's going to translate into your businesses.
Politics as a whole. Well, I think in Europe, yes, it's moved a little bit more to the right, but I think the center majority holds. And so I don't think that that will impact the Green Deal. And quite frankly, I think the narrative now for continuing to build out renewables is it's not just the green part. I mean, quite frankly, it's the energy independence, which I think plays into also the, let's say, more right wing and the affordability issue. So I think it's difficult to argue with. I mean, you can argue with one of these. It's difficult to argue with all three of them. And so we're quite. I mean, we feel very comfortable with what's going to happen in Europe. I don't see us stepping back.
I mean, if we've got going to have von der Leyen still as President of the Commission, let's see in a couple of days. But I wouldn't expect us to go back. On the contrary, I'd expect people to continue to focus much more on execution. So when we go to Brussels, it's not so much now about producing new legislation. It's execution, execution, execution. How are we actually going to transpose that into the member state level or get the member states to transpose it, get it down to the regional level? I think that's going to be the key word. In the U.S., as I mentioned, I don't, you know, we've lived under a Trump administration. This is very much a state-level issue. I think you mentioned, Andy, about the Republican states. I mean, we see it. Our biggest markets in the U.S. are Republican states, Republican counties.
Just don't say it's because you're saving the planet. That's literally our business developer. Sometimes we come out with these ads or commercials like, you know, we're going to save the planet. And they're like, you know, forget it. Just don't do that. Just, it's jobs, it's growth, it's cheap energy. That's it. So tailor your message to the different audiences in the U.S. That's all they care about. And if you say you're going to save the planet, you're almost going to be disqualified from building it. So it's like it just becomes then a very political issue. But this is just to say that I don't see, I continue to see tremendous growth in the U.S. I don't think that will change with the administration. I mean, you can be worried about the politics in the U.S. for a lot of other reasons.
Probably it impacts Europe more than our business in the U.S. I would worry a little bit about offshore, because the only thing Trump has said very clearly is that he would pass an executive order in relation to offshore. Now, he can say that one day and say something different the next day. But let's say that's the only part, I think, of renewables that maybe has a bigger question mark.
I mean, you haven't actually, so you haven't touched on Brazil. I don't know whether how that's going.
I mean, Brazil, listen, I was actually with the regulator this week. I mean, it's super stable, super predictable. They've just renewed. So as you know, the distribution, for example, has concessions, 30-year concessions. Some of them were coming up to the end now. In fact, the first distribution to end its concession life was one of ours. They've just come out with a decree which basically allows you to extend for another 30 years with no strings attached, except you have to comply with, you have to have complied with certain quality of service requirements. So as long as you are complying with that, you get, you can get that automatic extension. So Brazil we see as a super stable market from a sector perspective. I mean, I'm not going to discuss FX or even politics.
I know things are more challenging.
But if you look at the fundamentals, it's actually extremely sophisticated. Over time, I would argue it's more sophisticated than a lot of other countries, like developed countries. And so it continues to be a market with tremendous opportunities, particularly now on networks. And so, yeah. And so I don't think the politics there really has impacted.
That's helpful. Did you want to add anything on the UK?
I mean, not for the first time, Europe nudges one way and the UK seems to nudge another way. But obviously, that's, I mean, that's quite a good place to be. I mean, Labour, the 2030, they call it a mission. I think that's important to remember. This is a mission, not necessarily a hard target. But in our discussions with Labour, and I think Andy's right, they have been well engaged with industry for some time now. I think they understand this is not just about lobbing 30 or 40 gigawatts of offshore wind up and hoping the transmission comes. They get the importance of transmission, but they also get the importance of the other technologies to make the system whole. So I have heard, I mean, I don't know how many secretaries of state we've had during our careers. I suspect it's quite a few.
But if it is Ed Miliband on Friday morning, Ed Miliband has been in energy for a long time. And I think he is well aware of some of the challenges. And he also knows that you need to decarbonize the thermal sector. You need to get some of these mechanisms away. You'll need batteries, and you'll need to be sending positive messages to consumers about their usage. And ultimately, what we don't talk about, but perhaps is the thing that's coming, is strategic investment in distribution is clearly going to be very important as well. That's slightly not ignored necessarily, but transmission's getting maybe the headlines at the moment. But the distribution space has to come in time. And I think that's well understood. Can I give you one just quick insight? Ireland's interesting.
Ireland, 20 years ago, I would say it was ahead in terms of the renewable transition. It has slight pause and stasis. Now it's in a situation where it's trying to get its offshore wind industry away and is actually having to build diesel, not what they want to do in Ireland, to protect their system rather than the offshore wind they like. I think politicians well understand the need to keep advancing and keep maturing their industries to deliver this.
Yeah. Just going to make a quick comment about this, well, large number of deals of take privates of mid-sized renewables over the last couple of months. So I think that's a good example of basically some of the big infrastructure funds or private equity funds really coming into the sector now and sort of taking a position, whether it's on the politics or whether it's the general macro trend. But it's clearly been sort of a string of deals over the last couple of months.
Yeah. Certainly is. Just conscious of the time, just whether anyone has any questions. We've got a microphone here. I know we're pressed for time, but so you've talked about, obviously, the LCOE is coming down from your production side. Great. We had a hiatus, and now hopefully it'll start coming down. Fine. You've talked about that it's a seller's market, so you are creating value over invested capital. Not everybody, by the way. There are some IPPs who are clearly not. I think the more sophisticated ones who can navigate it are. But tell me, do you not think there are contracts out there which are really very deficient, not from the good operators that have it? Because they're becoming more complex, right? But that seems to have taken a shift. And the second thing is you've talked about the system, the intermittent nature of the system.
You've talked about the cost having to come down, but only if the grid's distribution, we can either mitigate the peaks through clever distribution, smart and all the rest of it, but also through batteries or gas, no? And dare I say, I live in the U.S., so I'd say horrific things because they still use gas to balance the system very well, in fact, and therefore their costs are very low. So where are we going to get? It's going to take a long, long time for hydrogen to meet that purpose. So how do you think about that?
So super interesting questions to try and answer at least. So on the first one, I think there's a, if you think about it in terms of vintages of projects, there's like a relatively bad vintage of projects from when cost of capital was really low, inflation was expected to be really low. And basically, those are not great projects. If you look at the projects that you are investing in today, I mean, these are some of the best projects I've seen over the last 10, 15 years or so. Talking about high, very high single digits, IRRs, for example, in places like the U.S., very good, strong cash yields, high PPA prices. So I think these are the projects that will be coming online in 2025, 2026, and beyond.
So I think there's your point about the deficiency of projects. I think that's in relation to particular vintage. I think the ones you're investing in now that we're taking investment decisions now are great projects. On the issue around technologies, I mean, maybe this is a simplistic view, but wind is a premium product. It plays out over the day. It's scarce. But if you can get it, it's a great project. Solar is a commodity, pure solar. So nowadays, I think you need to be super lean if you want to make a margin on solar, or you then need to add on batteries and some energy management to actually take that relatively cheap energy and spread it out over the day.
So I think solar will always have to be coupled with something else over time, because otherwise, if you just go solar 100%, I mean, you cannibalize yourself and you end up sort of, or the sector cannibalizes itself and drives it out. So I think those that have good energy management capabilities, those that have the ability to couple different technologies together. So we've been strong advocates, for example, for hybridization, putting wind and solar together, together with hydro, together with batteries, really thinking about bringing these different technologies together. And then you can really create a premium product. And you can get like that additional return above what would be, let's say, a normal market return.
I mean, I think that's absolutely spot on. I mean, we've always run a vertically integrated portfolio for exactly that reason. We are sat with a bunch of DevEx on a whole bunch of technologies which are yet to be deployed at any scale anywhere in the world on the assumption that governments, our governments in the U.K., will get there. And obviously, they've been consulting on particularly carbon capture and hydrogen for a while. So we sit there ready to invest should the policy come. We also have a pumped storage project that you know about, which I think everyone in my entire organization would love to build that as an enduring project. But again, it does exactly what you say. It effectively stabilizes grid and stabilizes the market. The really interesting thing on this is we have a bunch of gas stations.
They are there to back up our own renewable intermittency and to provide security of supply to grid. Their load factors are coming down. The reason for that is because of renewable penetration. They're not needed quite so much. Their earnings are actually pretty stable off the capacity mechanism. They've been very high for the last two years covering volatility. They'll be down this year. The capacity mechanism is effectively an insurance premium paid by the consumer through government processes that stabilizes that. My vision of the world is I agree carbon capture and hydrogen will take a bit of time to come. In the meantime, gas will continue to back up. As we overload with renewables, perhaps those load factors come down and you get an emissions benefit that way.
I think we might have one more question, if any. Over.
Thank you. You talked about the challenges of supply chains. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on using Chinese equipment. Obviously, in solar, that's dominating, but there's political considerations elsewhere. But I mean, even today, I think we saw that one of the first preferred supplier agreements in offshore wind with Mingyang in Germany. What are your thoughts on that politically and economically?
I mean, very quickly, historically, we've had a few OEMs, not Chinese OEMs, European OEMs, US OEMs. We value those relationships very highly. So that's been where our focus has been. Of course, there's parts of Chinese supply chain in some of our equipment, of course there is. And actually, in the battery side, we are using a Chinese supplier there. So we're not against it, but historically, we've gone to the relationships that we understand and know.
I mean, on my side. So clearly, for solar, it's difficult to get around it. Maybe you can de-risk China and move to diversify your supply chain. And that's what we've done, particularly, for example, in relation to the U.S. supply chain. And obviously, turbines in the U.S. are not Chinese. You could never think about getting that. In Europe, I do think, so we don't have any Chinese turbines, but I do think there's a case to look at them. And if they're competitive and they comply with all the cybersecurity issues and all of those issues, that we should think about introducing some, because otherwise it's a very, I mean, going back to my point, solar is coming down. Wind is now in a state where a little bit of competition would not be a bad thing.
I think we might have reached time. If you don't mind joining me in thanking Miguel and Martin. Thank you.