Good morning and welcome to another exciting quarter in Magnora, and we're pleased to introduce our acceleration of our data center project development business. So first of all, I'm very pleased to say that Peter Nygren will be heading up our Swedish data center business development, and he has experience from Arise Windpower as the CEO and founder, and also a co-investor and active owner in Helios prior to the sales of Helios last year. We also acquired Torpheia in partnership with the Blix Group, a very successful local data center operator here in Oslo, and the founder John Amundsen in Torpheia, a leader in communication and the Norwegian data center industry. The team, Peter Nygren, Blix, and Torpheia, has decades of experience from infrastructure development and data center business, and Pieter also has great experience from district heating and cooling systems from his career in NCC.
We have been approached by a dozen of developers and landowners interested in discussing our data center business with them. We have received multiple bids on our projects, and we're in negotiation and discussions across wind, solar, and BESS assets across the portfolio in all markets. We have also multiple dialogues with investment into our various platforms in Magnora and also our most recent data center business. We have expanded the team in Italy, and we're ready to accelerate and develop and prepare for sales for next year. We have rapid acceleration in Germany, where the number of prospects on track for near-term grid applications rose to seven. On the ScotWind project, we're seeing improvements in supply chain. Mingyang might establish a factory close to our site in Scotland. Also, the AR7, the next CFD round, will be closed around year-end.
Our environmental data confirms the viability of the project. In the U.K., finally, the grid reform is set to speed up, and we've increased the portfolio of the two, three projects there to 158 megawatts, and these projects have high market interest. The data center demand is booming, and Magnora has the capabilities to deliver because what we do is very similar to the data center business, so let's look at the figures. The market is expected to grow by four by 2035 and double by 2030. In Europe, traditionally, the FLAP-D markets, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin have saturated and stagnated. Vacancies are very low, and prices for real estate and grid connections are very hard to deal with. The E.U., in general, lags the U.S. by two to three years, and on the right side, you see the demand from players like Amazon and Microsoft.
Amazon alone will need 80 terawatt hours to develop current plans. So let's look at Europe. Why the Nordics? So you see that the Nordics in 2024 had the lowest electricity prices in all of Europe, and it's been like that for decades. The share of green energy in Europe is astonishing. Norway 99%, Denmark 89%, Sweden 71%. The FLAP-D markets just 41%. So Iberia and the Nordics are soaring as a very interesting place to be if you want to be in Europe. We also have a cold climate. The temperature is less than 10 degrees over the year. Very good fiber infrastructure, high adoption of cloud and AI in general. If we look to Norway, we've seen the different analysts estimate growth of around five megawatts, both in terawatt hours, I mean, in both Norway and Sweden over the next four years.
So this is a very interesting place to be. The attractiveness of the region is cost competitiveness, a regulatory framework that's very good, and especially in Sweden with a lot of district heating, which is important for the waste heat from data centers. If you look on the left side, you see how you develop a renewable project, land power connection, zoning, regulation of property, and environmental and building permits. Very similar. The difference is really just fiber and potentially operations of data centers. And you also have the waste heat and cooling system that's special for the data centers. But those are skills we have in-house, so now we know better how we develop good data center projects with the team we have. Let's look closer at the team. Peter Nygren on the left side, Bjørn Drangsholt, a leader who worked for decades in the power industry at Statkraft.
He developed the Google project in Skien, and he worked on that project for six years. It's one of the largest data center projects in the Nordics. You could look it up on Google. John Amundsen, he is a leader within the industry. He worked for DigiPlex, NATO, with IT systems. He developed the emergency network in Norway, TETRA, and also happened to be in the development of the Skagen fiber connection between Norway and Denmark. And last but not least, our co-investor Eirik Blix of Blix Group and Blix Solutions, who operate two data centers here in Oslo. He's a true leader within the industry. So we're trying to leverage our team, the Torpheia acquisition, and our relations in Sweden and Norway. We're prioritizing Sweden with greenfield hyperscale projects.
Typical range is 20-150 megawatts, and I won't be surprised if we not in the soon future will close a few deals in Sweden with Pieter and his team, so our lead base in Sweden is now above 1,000 megawatts, and in Norway, 500 megawatts of projects. We've been approached and have approached landowners, business developers, utilities, real estate developers, and data center companies. Grid companies in Norway, they prefer to work with operators, so the Torpheia acquisition is important for realizing projects in Norway. A little bit about unit economics. If you take a well-run one megawatt data center, you can have revenues between NOK 20-40 million from such a center. The EBITDA could run then between NOK 7-12 million per year.
So Torpheia can potentially grow to five megawatts based on the infrastructure and the real estate we have there, so you can multiply those figures with five. And the expansion can happen maybe through some leasing of equipment. But if you look at AI, and if we would be able to retrofit that facility to AI, the revenues would be much higher, and obviously also the investment. We wouldn't do that without the customer who would pay for the investment, but the most important thing is that we have the grid connection. We have an operation there, so we think it's a very interesting asset for us to own and to grow. Let's look at some market observations here. On the right side, you see data center load, and think about a data center running at 19 megawatts.
And during the summer, when temperature rises above 20 degrees, you see that to run at full capacity, you would need 25 megawatts, so 30% more energy. And we have a big solar portfolio in Norway, and this portfolio could fit really well for the market demand for data centers in the years to come. No one thinks this is really of high interest now, but this figure, chart speaks for itself. So in Norway, you have great opposition toward onshore wind because of reindeer there, nature conservation, and not in my backyard. Hydropower is also to some degree saturated, and it has many regulatory challenges with wild reindeer there. So solar could be quite interesting for data centers in general because it's sunny at day when the temperature is the highest, and in the Nordics, you never have temperature above 20 degrees or very rarely in the night.
So a little bit about the Q2 in brief for our long-term shareholders. You know this slide well. We are capital-friendly. We think a lot about capital allocation. We returned NOK 1 billion to our shareholders over the last year. We always try to have a good return on our investment and stay loyal to the capital-light model. In case we do something more capital-intensive on data centers, we would do that in a sister company with financial partners, so it wouldn't affect our balance sheet. Close to 7,000 shareholders listed on Oslo Stock Exchange Main Board. Market for data centers is really, really high. We saw the terawatt hour estimate, but we see around 20-30 billion NOK per year of investments in data centers in Norway and similar in Sweden.
So it's a very interesting market if you know the market well, the grid connections, and have a good project team. We have NOK 192 million in cash, and combined with our credit facility, NOK 342 million. We've reduced costs somewhat in the quarter by running our operations more efficiently. Zero bank debt. So we grew the portfolio a little more modestly since we had a lot of focus on our sales processes in the quarter, but also on our data center business. We expect a large pickup in the land bank in the quarter due to some signing of larger projects, in particular in South Africa, but maybe also in a few of the European markets. On the right side, you see that we went from zero to 1,500 megawatt in leads during the quarter.
We started, of course, to work on this market earlier this year, so this didn't happen from thin air. So our team has worked diligently with the market players, and we've been able to establish ourselves as a partner many would like to speak with as an alternative to foreign companies sitting far away. So we're very happy about the leads we have today. So we have a diversified portfolio across technologies. Data centers will be a key growth driver going forward. Solar portfolio remains solid and mostly in South Africa. The battery systems, it's a very, very interesting market, and you see very, very interesting developer margins in Germany, north of EUR 200,000 per megawatt. Onshore wind, we only have that in South Africa, and there you also have very solid margins for good projects.
And we have focused on multiple projects for many years, and we believe we have several clusters up for sales to very interesting counterparties and that we could sell 200-300 megawatts per year going forward into the next decade. And we also have our offshore wind projects, in particular ScotWind, and it's going to be very interesting news in the quarter about both the supply chain turbines availability from Mingyang and others, and also the AR7. So we're working closely with multiple players in that market as we speak. Here's the portfolio update across the different regions. I think I touched on most of the items across the countries and regions. We, of course, I would like to remind all about the earnings from potentially the Evolar sale and also Helios Nordic Energy.
We expect more projects to close there after a quiet period for some time in the Nordics, both for wind and solar. But as data center demand picks up, we think that we see strong demand for Nordic renewable projects. I also mentioned the U.K., that it's coming up, and we see very strong interest from even unsolicited parties. Our business model, it remains the same, also in data center development business, NOK 200-20 million per project or platform opportunity, and that we should see a solid multiple of five. We see that data center margins per megawatt might run higher than for renewable projects because it's very capital-intensive, seven times more per megawatt for data centers and 20 times more than for solar, even 25 times. So that enables us to capture a larger margin with the right project.
I'll get back to that a little later in the presentation. The business model, I've gone through this many times before, but for our new listeners, we developed a project. We have DevEx, and then we sell prior or at ready to build to our customers. An example of customers' owners you see down on the right side. Our key deliverables are landowner agreement, grid connection, permits, technical management services, project management, even procurement management, and other items. Strategy has simple rules. We will try to sell projects early on, even in the data center business, and Pieter has ideas about that already, so it'd be very exciting to follow. We try to focus on teams with high integrity. It's always easier to work with high integrity people, stay in early stage, and diversification. Norway and Sweden. We started in Sweden. We have had very big success in Sweden before.
We like the business culture, the regulatory landscape, how the grid companies operate, and how the municipalities and counties, so Pieter has our full attention, and he's going to run fast. Examples of customers I mentioned before, and even Vinci has branched into the data center business, so very exciting. Commerz Real and others follow suit, and in South Africa, we see a lot of pickup in data center, interesting cables, projects from North America running through South Africa to Australia, so many interesting initiatives. Here you see our portfolio and which markets and which technologies we focus on. Won't spend more time on that. EBITDA, slightly improvement from Q2, and operating loss also less, and no tax payable, and in general, better operations, better performance, more cost focus. In general, I think it's a sign of the times. We try to take well care of our money.
Operating activities, negative NOK 29. Investment activities, last payment on our South African BESS project, financial close, dividend of NOK 12.1, and then cash balance of NOK 192.6. So due to the rare high growth data center opportunity we see, the board has decided to cut the regular dividend of NOK 12 million and reallocate that capital towards the high growth opportunity we see within the data center business. We've been approached by several of our larger investors and many smaller who see this as a very interesting opportunity, and we want to grow as fast as possible. We think it's a very interesting window, the next 12- 24 months, to focus on establishing a strong and growing business in the data center space.
About consolidation, data centers will be consolidated since it's more than 50% of our business, and that accounts for both Torpheia, where we expect financial close any day soon, and also Magnora DC AB in Sweden. Outlook, we're working really hard on farm down and expect sales in most markets. We see a surge of interest to partner with Magnora in the data center space, also in the BESS space, and the BESS opportunity, sorry, the data center opportunity gives us an opportunity for recurring revenues. We're still going to be loyal to buybacks and extraordinary dividends. The group has implemented new cost control systems, which makes it easier to consolidate our financial numbers early and also track costs more on a real-time basis. So we still believe we remain on track to achieve 10 gigawatts by year-end.
We have multiple large sales processes, and if we're able to close some of them, we might be able to reach the 600-725 MW target. We're late in the year, so it might be a little challenge, but we work really hard to do that. In addition, there are other ways to monetize, and we constantly think about capital allocation, and there's also opportunities to invite investors into our platforms and monetize that way, so we're looking very carefully into all measures. On the margin side, we've raised the potential margin for projects we sell up to NOK 3 million per MW based on the multiples we see in the data center space, so we don't expect to sell a data center project before Christmas, but Pieter might be able to pull that off for one smaller project, but we'll see.
But in general, you could expect margins up to NOK 3 million per megawatt for data centers in the Nordics going forward if you have attractive grid connections. Shareholder base remain quite similar. We've seen a few new interesting parties. We've met with real estate investors in the Nordics who are interested in looking into data center opportunities, and as we get more data center content, we think we're going to be attractive for a few of these European real estate investors since there are a few opportunities currently. With that, I would like to thank you for your attention, and I wish you have a great day. Thank you very much.