Hi, and welcome to Minesto's second quarter report 2025. With us to present, we have CEO Martin Edlund. If you have any questions for the company, you can use the form to your right. With that, I give the word to you, Martin.
Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. I'm going to spend some time here to give you a brief run-through of where we are as a company, Minesto, with today's half-year report public since a few minutes ago. First, I'd like to say a few words on testing and our mega machine, the product that is targeted to drive sales and build out. For the second quarter this year, we had it back in the water for its second production run, and it is still running in a very positive way for us as a company. We have made configuration changes, foremost to extend the length of the tether that attaches it to the seabed. As predicted, we get a 25% increase in production by utilizing this.
The test site we have is originally targeting smaller units, but with historic path dependencies with Brexit and the evolution of things in Wales, we moved to this test site, decided to do that several years ago when we planned the launch of this Dragon 12. It means it's installed in this site with a little bit shallower water than what it's optimized for. We've been able to, despite that, get closer to the right length of the tether, and it is very, very comfortable to see that this longer tether gives us the performance that we expect. For the first commercial site in Hestfjord, around the corner, literally from where we are, there will be yet a further extension of the tether for that installation. This is very important and very good news for us.
It's easy to say that it's by far the best and most robust system that we've ever built. We're in the fourth month of production here with it, and the plan is to keep going. If there are any reasons for us to bring it back, we will do that and investigate for further development. We believe we have enough real production data now to motivate the verification of the technology relative to the dialogues we have on project investors in Hestfjord. Of course, it's good to keep testing as much as possible as we move forward. We've also been able to secure grant-based funding and get a consortia together to move on microgrid products. A SEK 25 million grant injection to a consortia that targets building a microgrid based on Minesto's Dragons is something that has started now. We were awarded this earlier in the beginning of the summer.
This is really great news for us at Minesto to have this in place. We will work with Capture Energy, the local partners, SEV and consultants, to really bring this alive. Good expert partners, solid consortia that we've built around it. You can ask, and we've been asked, is this a distraction now when it comes to the bigger race and the big farms? I'd say it's not at all the case. On the contrary, this enforces and strengthens, let's say, the rollout and the business agenda we have. It's a complete product setup where we get other commercial partners to invest in complementary systems so that we really can offer turnkey microgrids from Minesto.
We have a close involvement from SEV, the local utility, where their ambition and the plan of this whole project is to build this and verify its functionality in Vestmanna at the current test site and then move it to a commercial site on one of the non-grid connected locations in the Faroe Islands. Of course, we target other sites with other partners around the world as well, and we will be able to shorten lead times for delivery and be on our toes to get those projects going. Often, it is asked by those partners out there to do a small project first. Not that they're interested in small projects per se long term, but it will speed up environmental consenting and local acceptance and turn around things quicker. I think that's a relevant connection to the bigger business as well.
Of course, it's important to acknowledge that for Minesto, we're going to deliver basically the same product into a microgrid setting as we do into a grid-connected array setting. The upgrades we're doing, and that's funded in this project, is also beneficiary for the array side of it. We will build our core products as a part of this project as well. A final note on this is that we might sort of over-interpret the prefix micro in this context. When it comes to microgrids, it's more a matter of an isolated system working in island mode in a certain context. We can see applications maybe up to 40, 50 MW, which from our tech company perspective would be something very far from the prefix micro, so to speak. I think that's important aspects of this project.
Of course, also since we're integrating energy storage and we're going to use tidal energy as sort of the complete production source of energy in those systems, it will also give us hands-on evidence on the baseload characteristics of tidal and how little storage that's needed compared to other more stochastic renewables. Really good news for us. We're already moving on this project. The next topic here would be the market establishment work, the core activity of Minesto in many ways now. I know also, obviously, of vital interest to our shareholders. How far are we in our customer dialogues? When will we see Minesto launching press releases with announcements of big sales? We are working broadly and in depth, more intensively and with more activity than ever in this area.
I think that just to show you some insights into this, I mean, we're not just doing the same thing and trying to knock on doors. It's a very, let's say, rich and in-depth process to reach into those, especially the large renewable project developers and their decision-making processes. We're doing everything on securing the resource to create confidence that the tidal resource is as strong as we say and that other local conditions are in place. We're working on customizing our kites, also with simulation tools. We have now, during the second quarter here, also added a very powerful tool to analyze the grid impact of what we do, basically to be able to put economic value on the baseload characteristics of the tidal technologies that we're offering. We're strengthening our way of creating this breakthrough and working hard in this area.
We've also set up for the Faroe Islands, we've set up a market development company that we've labeled Dredchin. The Dredchin company is sort of the business model concept that we're using. Since the first project will be small, there are project risks and there are perceptions of technical risks from the customers. We're putting the right to move on the whole Faroe Island context into this Dredchin company. Dredchin means the dragon in Faroese, so I think it's quite an appropriate label for it. The hands-on work for us is to invite different types of investors into Dredchin and then use Dredchin as the main owner and builder of the Hestfjord.
In addition, we've had a really interesting quarter behind us when it comes to exposure, product exposure, brand exposure, and to be able to talk about our tidal solutions as a necessary or extremely valuable addition to the global energy mix. This work means a lot to us in many ways: investor relations, customer relations, and to sort of broaden and fill CRM systems with relevant partners. Of course, to create more awareness of this sector as something that is really moving forward and is far from what it used to be historically with horizontal axis, niche-oriented solutions. I think this exposure that we get from this is of significant value. You see, we use our test site in the upper right corner here. Cecilia, our Communications Director, is showing the site to stakeholders.
We're invited to be a part of Team Sweden in a very positive way, together with the big Swedish industry players, and get a lot of promotional opportunities in those contexts to build trust and to build relationships. I think that it's appropriate to be really proud and satisfied with the fact that we have over 500 million views and exposures on Minesto's products and our brand over this quarter, where the project, the marketing project together with SKF on a global scale, of course, has been the leading driver for this. The one where we take sort of the Faroe Islands space program and make some interesting sort of claims there on running a space program without leaving Earth. If you haven't seen it, you can easily find it via our homepage.
I think it's pretty cool work from the team at SKF to put this together in this way. For the second quarter, we choose to secure funding short-term with a loan that was quite comfortable to set up in April to give us more room to look into different finance and solutions and to build the company further. We keep doors open for autumn and onwards on what would be the best way to push forward with securing funding and moving Minesto forward. We also acknowledge that the stock market and the perception of renewable innovation is improving again. The position there, we believe, is quite good at the moment.
We've also completed a process that we have been working with systematically for more than a year on focusing Minesto's organization to Gothenburg to integrate operations, technology, and, of course, sales and marketing, the business development side in a clear way. Basically, the whole team is now under the same roof in Frölunda in Gothenburg, including the workshop and the build of tech and testing onshore of technical systems. This has also led to a more efficient organization. We cut around 30% of our fixed costs, giving us more room to build things and to invest in the early phases of site development to lower hurdles for the first movers to work with us. All in all, it's been a good second quarter.
We are really looking forward to autumn 2025 with commercial focus and with build and design of upgraded Dragon 12 systems in the Swedish Energy Agency-funded project together with partners. I think with that, I'll hold my horses and see if there are any comments or questions from our shareholders.
Thank you so much for that presentation. If we'll move over to the Q&A, first question here. How much energy does the big Dragon 12 deliver per day after your optimization?
We're not publishing the absolute numbers of production where we are yet from this test site. You can say that the amount of energy we produce over a tidal cycle at this site is perfectly equivalent to what goes right into the business case for Hestfjord. It verifies the production performance in a way that is a necessity to get the investments ready for it.
Thanks. How far have you progressed with the negotiations on the various parks in the Faroe Islands?
In the eyes of the beholder, I mean, we have significant progress. We have a large number of actors that we're working with. How far we are from closing that deal is not something I either want or can comment on.
Thanks. What are the pilots planned for Minesto, and how do you get access to the best possible locations?
I didn't get the first part of the question there, pilot.
I think they mean projects, future projects.
Could you repeat that, please?
What are the pilots planned for Minesto, and how do you get access to the best possible locations?
Okay. The planned pilots now are concentrated to Vestmanna to run one or two of the smaller systems as a part of the Energy Agency collaboration, and to keep working with a large MW scale Dragon 12. We have three sites or foundations that we can produce from that are grid connected. That is the basic demo and test site, pilot site that we have. We are working on, I think we're up to 11 different markets now in dialogues on customer-funded first installations. That could be 10 MW first phase of projects, and it can be smaller scale, more microgrid type of installations. Which one it's going to be, we don't know at the moment.
We know one thing, that we will be able to deal with two more apart from the Faroe Islands in parallel from where we are now if the sizes and scales don't differ too much. Out of the 10, 12 where we are, a few of them will be managed, and that's sort of the short-term ambition to move on. Finding the right sites is, on a high level, easy. You have a lot of data showing how much flow there is, and you can be really certain that this can be turned into production sites at those locations, geographically on a sort of a low-resolution map of a country or a region.
When it comes to the detailed site development, and especially for the first ones where we haven't proven well-known economic value of what we do, I mean, if you compare it to finding an oil well near the coastline, there will be a lot of support to really start drilling at that location, not considering any other aspects. Where we are, we need to be really smart and clever with not colliding with local interest to too large an extent because we are still a small, less powerful organization coming in. We're using local strong partners to push the agenda that know the local territory, and we have built a lot of experience in assessing those sites, not only technically and simulating flows, but also to understand the context around it. Is it a lot? Is it a fishing pressure in this area?
Is it used for other marine purposes and so forth? It is critical also that the first sites are almost perfect from a technical perspective so we get good production data together with customers. There is an abundance of those that we have identified so far. It takes time, and it's a lot of effort that goes into it. I believe Kapfugu in Taiwan, we have Broome in Australia, we have several sites in the Philippines, Strait of Alas in Indonesia. I can keep going on and on. We have sites in Cook Inlet in Alaska and in Finnmark in Norway, the site in Wales, and targeted ones in Scotland. We're also looking into South Chile. There we have sites that we know would be perfect from a physics perspective, but we are not moving on all of those from a practical perspective.
A long answer on, I believe, a very important and critical topic for us.
Thanks. Next question here. Does the ongoing climate change have any impact on the Dragon 12's production capabilities?
That was almost a philosophical question. Impact on the performance of them. One impact is that the agenda to become more renewable, to push towards a 100% renewable system, makes it easier in a way because we will have to use different tools in the toolbox to succeed with this transition. Even immature technologies such as ours get attention and will be considered because of the more, let's say, desperate state of the planet. Physically or technically, we can't, I mean, for a foreseeable economic future, if you think 100 years ahead, water temperature differing with 0.5 degrees or the water rising with a few centimeters here and there, those aspects will not influence it. There's only one aspect I can think of.
If it gets a little bit warmer, we will need to be more careful with marine growth because that's more of a concern in waters that are warm than in cold waters. Apart from that, I have no more thinking. Maybe the person asking the question has some clever insights to it that we haven't understood yet.
Thanks. How does Minesto handle maintenance of the kites? Are you competitive in this area?
This is one of our main, let's say, sales arguments when we compare this to other ocean-based renewables and actually energy systems at large when it comes to service maintenance. We have a lightweight system that we can tow to its site. The ratio CapEx from the kite hardware that needs attention is a small part of a big project. You can have spare units; we'll sell more kites than there will actually be in operation as one scenario. We can do planned service maintenance and service maintenance in general on systems onshore while we keep full availability on the Dragon farm, on the array. Since they're lightweight, we also handle them with lorry cranes and even man-handled carts on gravel quaysides. It's a very advantageous area for us, especially if you compare to large wind farms, large wind systems, or everything else in wave and tidal.
Of course, there is more to learn and optimize when it comes to service intervals and what service schemes will be needed for a 20-25 year project. When you swap out gearbox oil, seal changes, some of those most sort of obvious service needs, you can add fatigue from load fatigue that rudders might need to be changed every 50 or so. We believe that this area is the best way for us to really get a good handle of this is to build Hestfjord and start working with it. It's next door from our test site. We have personnel there, so we will have a cost-effective synergy between the commercial site and our learning and discovery operations from the R&D test site. We like to talk about service and maintenance.
Thanks.
Of course, when we talk to project investors and when we talk about, okay, what is stopping the first movers from jumping into Minesto, we have more of a challenge with a completely new technology to prove meantime between failure and to show that service intervals are on the scale and level that we claim. We are also countering that by offering, for the first tiers of build-out here, fixed-price service maintenance into those contexts.
Thanks. Next question, a bit similar here. How long is the lifespan of the kite, and how will Minesto handle kites that need to be discarded?
Yes, the lifespan of a project is around 25 years. We have 20 years in our levelized cost of energy calculation. We're at that project lifelength, similar to offshore wind, I'd say. The kite will last as long, but there will be some components that we will swap out over the lifetime of the kite. I think we have now, we're around 1.5 x of lifetime product spare part costs compared to the initial sales price of the unit. Cost here is referred to the cost for the owner of the array of the park.
Thanks. Next here, turbulence on tariffs, has it caused any inefficiencies for you to date or changed the overall sourcing landscape?
I didn't understand the question.
The turbulence with the tariffs in the world, has it caused any inefficiencies for you to date or changed the overall sourcing landscape?
Tariffs, if you mean subsidies on electricity subsidies, if that's the question, that's an area with a lot of challenges similar to the challenges any energy technology faced when it's being introduced. I think we have quite a stable situation on some of the key markets we're targeting. The price in the Faroe Islands is stipulated by law for the first, let's say, demo phase of also large-scale build-out. The price level is high to start with because it's a small-scale generation environment on an island. In some of the targeted markets, such as Taiwan, there are very, very competitive tariff levels for ocean renewables. Taiwan with over SEK 2.5 per kWh, which is really, really good for us moving forward there.
Thanks. Next here, are your technology competitive compared with solar PV, offshore wind, combined with storage? How far are you behind in costs today?
This is a key area to discuss, and we could have a seminar on its own on this one. One of the big news for the second quarter here on business development for Minesto is that we now have a role linear optimization capacity when it comes to optimize grids and analyze a grid with and without tidal. Of course, we start with the Faroe Islands. I'm going to be a little bit careful here with throwing numbers at you that we're working on verification with, and we will get back to this as more, let's say, stringent news. I can say that a scenario for the Faroe Islands, where we have 50% of Minesto's tidal technology with the growth scenarios moving forward, is by far the most competitive 100% renewable generation scenario with a grid mix that exists today. We're not talking about 5%.
We're talking about significantly more than that. If you take project by project and you talk levelized cost of energy on a technology level, an immature technology such as ours being deployed at small scale will have cost disadvantages. Solar will push ahead and be cheap when it comes to the solar PV panels as such. Depending on locations, the cost of solar will also, as any other technology, will have to be analyzed from that context. The Faroe Islands, they have a few hundred kW installed, and the main cost driver is the structures holding the panels so they last over storm and also for all the salty rain that falls on them to get that cleaned. Very unique aspects to the Faroe Islands.
You combine that with the world's least sun hours of any capital in the world, so you could probably put solar energy sort of as a marginal use in that context. We predict that we will be cheaper than offshore wind with Minesto's tidal technology when we have built around a gigawatt of capacity because of the generic cost structure we have and the yearly yield per MW. On the higher system level, for the consumers and for the users of electricity and on a national level, the cost of building renewable energy systems or energy systems with a high rate of penetration for renewables, our tidal energy technology reduces the cost. We will be able to prove that with rigor optimization models as we move forward. We're using that in relationship to our customers. I think that's really, really interesting to keep in mind moving forward.
Thanks. There is a business offer at Holyhead site. The question is if there's a support scheme for CFD AR7 considered for this site.
Oh, yes. We're in full dialogues on what type of subsidies and how to set this up. I can't comment on details on it, but you can say that Minesto reducing its staff by not having a team in Wales has nothing to do with a business opportunity related to Holy Head Deep. It's one of the sites in the world where we have best control over all conditions around it and where grid connections are being invested in by third parties. This is definitely an area where we're moving forward. We're using EY in that context as well. I think it's in the comments from the report we just published also that we've just set up a data room for Holy Head to work in the same way as with the Faroe Islands to attract investors.
There will be a need to get the contract for difference context into the Holy Head Deep site as well.
Thanks. That was the last question. I'd like to thank all the viewers, and I'll give the word to you, Martin, for some closing remarks.
Thank you so much for your attention. We will be back soon with more communication on Minesto and our work to pioneer the tidal industry. Thanks.