Good morning, and welcome to this Q2 and first half presentation from Ocean Sun. My name is Kristian Tørvold, and I am Ocean Sun's CEO. It has been an intense first half of this year for us, and we are truly excited about everything that has been happening, so let's get right to it. Today's presentation, we will give an update on our Q2, an update on our strategy. Then Karl will give an update on our numbers. Then we will do Q&A. We completed our share issue, and it was a great process with lots of hard work from our team and the board, and it ended with an over-subscription. It is important to note that the majority of the funds were from existing shareholders who continue to support us.
With these funds, we extend our runway several quarters, and we are confident that our current pipeline will extend this runway even further. We are working on a lot of exciting opportunities across the globe in an ever-growing floating solar market. To catch this market, we have further sharpened our strategy. We are pushing hard towards two growth engines, resorts and utilities licensing, and we are going to spend a lot more time on that later in this presentation. Furthermore, we have been awarded NOK 2.1 million in EU funding for building a demonstrator in La Palma. This EU Horizon project, with strong partners, will combine floating solar with desalination. This is a powerful combination that can be duplicated for islands and other water-scarce regions across the globe. We will initiate construction next year, and Ocean Sun will again deliver a combination of technologies that has never been done before.
As for commercial updates, we have just kicked off the construction of our first project in Brazil. Our COO, Carl Petter, is already on site to make sure everything goes according to plan. The project took a while to get all the approvals, but has moved in high gear after the grid connection was awarded earlier this spring. The first demo in Brazil is expected to open an enormous market for us on the freshwater areas of Brazil. We will work with our new freshwater technology, covering the country's many lakes and reservoirs. We have already had site visits to a handful potential follow-on projects and signed an MOU earlier this year. Brazil is a difficult market to enter, but we have now positioned ourselves with good partners, a strong local supply chain, and a cost almost matching that of land-based solar per kilowatt-hour.
Equally exciting is the work we are now doing with ACEN-Silverwolf. With our next generation's freshwater platform that has been showing great results, we are going to take on lakes and reservoirs in Southeast Asia together with one of the region's strongest players. The MOU carves the way, and we are aiming to sign the first project later this year. Countries like Malaysia has already tendered hundreds of megawatts, but we have lacked the right partner to be a player. This has now changed, and the combination of a strong partner and our low CAPEX tech, we believe we will be market leading. Thirdly, our Soneva Secret Project continues to deliver, and we are engaging with several other potential resorts in the Maldives.
We have good collaboration with Canopy Power, our partner for Soneva, and we are also engaging with other partners and have signed two MOUs in the Maldives this summer. This market is moving, and we are very well positioned to further expand in the coming quarters. I will go through the economics of these projects in the following slides. Scaling has taken longer than what we originally expected. From the get go, we were targeting the large freshwater reservoirs, but were faced with intense competition from pontoon suppliers. We therefore focused our efforts on nearshore FPV, a market that we believed would take off. However, the nearshore market wasn't mature enough, and we've had to create it together with partners in aquaculture and in resort business.
This is our engine one, and we see now, after our intense effort, there are many near-term opportunities, each being somewhere between 1 and 4 MWp. We expect to see progress and projects in this market in the very near term. What we have called engine two is an increased focus on the larger tenders using the licensing model. This is pure partner-led execution, where we supply our patented tech, engineering know-how, on-site supervision, and team up with great partners like ACEN-Silverwolf. I will drill down on these two engines now. With the danger of repeating myself, our Soneva project is enabling the resort to run on solar 90% of the time. With the diesel costs soaring in the past months, these resorts have seen their energy bills double and sometimes triple.
A floating solar installation in the Maldives from Ocean Sun can run at somewhere between $0.15 - $0.17 per kWh, while the resort today are paying $0.25 and more. We have heard reports of prices over $0.50 per kWh. This is the opportunity. There are 200 resorts in the Maldives running on diesel, and they will cut costs by more than half, increase energy security, reduce the CO2 footprint, reduce noise and smell from the diesel gen sets, and have stable power for more than 20 years with an investment that is paid back in two to four years. We know the Maldives alone is a $600 million market, powering the resorts with 2 -4 MWp each.
Adding resorts in other parts of the world, including the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and beyond, we are looking at a potential market of more than $1 billion. We are not saying that all resorts will run on floating solar, but we believe that the market and awareness will grow substantially in the coming quarters and years. These customers have a huge upside in cost and CO2 reduction. The approval process is generally quick, and they have available funds. As of now, we've signed three MOUs in total for this market specifically, and we have more than three projects in the commercial negotiations. Then there's the utility scale market. As stated, this has in many ways been our focus market from the beginning, winning the big tenders, but we have not been able to penetrate it properly in competition with pontoons.
There are many reasons for this, including lack of partners, but another key point is that we were not always tender-compliant. With our new generation freshwater solution, years in the making, but piloted in Norway earlier this year, we will be tender compliant. We can use standard PV modules, and we out-compete the pontoon solution on robustness and cost. This is why ACEN-Silverwolf signed an MOU with us, and they want to work with us to corner key markets in Southeast Asia. Globally, this is potentially a 77 GWp market. Leveraging on our licensing model towards the great partners we now have, such as ACEN-Silverwolf in Southeast Asia, UAP in Brazil, and soon to be disclosed powerhouse in India, we will enter this market now and take our share of the 77 GWp opportunity that this is.
We have the technology, we have the partners, and we are competing in an existing market. Thank you. Karl will update us on the financials.
The key financial event during this quarter has been the successful completion of the 20 million share issue. We are, as Kristian mentioned, very pleased that it was strong support from both existing and new shareholders, and that it resulted in an oversubscribed offering. This share issue significantly strengthens our balance sheet, and left us with NOK 21.1 million in cash at the end of the quarter, and leaves us at a good place to carry out this new and updated strategy. Operating income came to NOK 4 million for the first half year, and this is mainly related to research grants, while the result ended at -NOK 10.2 million. In short, a quarter that was about putting capital in place and positioning Ocean Sun for execution and growth. With that, we go over to Q&A. Been pleased with some questions in advance. Very good. Thank you for that.
I will read the questions that I think we haven't answered too much in the presentation. The first one is about the strategic review process with Fearnley, and that it was a process to explore alternatives to unlock Ocean Sun's commercial potential. Is the review still active and has Fearnley identified or engaged with any potential strategic or industrial partners?
Yeah. Together with Fearnley Securities, we conducted a strategic review that evaluated a range of alternatives to unlock shareholder value, including strategic partnerships and investments. Following this process, the board concluded before summer that the most attractive path for Ocean Sun and its shareholders was to sharpen the company's strategic focus on resorts and utility scale opportunities, and secure the capital needed to execute this strategy. As a result, Ocean Sun completed a share issue primarily dedicated towards existing shareholders. While we are continuously engaging with the industry and potential partners, our primary focus now is on delivering the commercial opportunities within the strategy we have in place and present.
Good. Let me check. Okay. Another question. Ocean Sun is now presenting potentially significant revenue opportunities from both the resort projects and utility scale licensing. What do you see as the single most important milestone investors should look for over the next 6 -1 2 months to demonstrate that this strategy is translating from MOUs and illustrative market economics into recurring commercial revenues and cash flow?
I believe investors should watch for two things, since we have two focuses in our strategy. The first one would be signing follow-on resort projects after Soneva Secret. That will be a very important milestone. Securing strong partners focused on large-scale deployment of our next generation freshwater solution.
We have another question here. What is the cost/investment for a typical multi-use project?
Well, it depends a bit, of course, on the size of the project and the size of the battery that goes with it. But we are seeing that the floating solar component is usually in the range of $700,000 to $1 million per kWp.
And kilowatt-peak.
Megawatt-peak, obviously.
Great. That was the last question.
Okay. Thank you for tuning into this quarterly presentation.