Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As a reminder to everyone in the room, this event is being webcast, and the presentation will be available on our website. At AES, we say safety is our first value, we begin every meeting with acknowledging where the emergency exits are. In case of emergency, you'll go out there and basically down the stairs, the escalator, the same way you came up. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements. There are many factors that may cause future results to differ materially from these statements, which are discussed in our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures can be found on our website along with the presentation. Joining us today are members of AES's senior management team.
We'll begin with an introduction from our President and CEO, Andrés Gluski, and then go to Ricardo Falú, who will cover our strategy for growth. Then we will cover our four new strategic business units. We'll have Leonardo Moreno presenting for renewables, Juan Ignacio Rubiolo for energy infrastructure, then we'll take a short break, then we'll have Kristina Lund for utilities, Chris Shelton for new energy technologies, and finally, we will have Steve Coughlin, our CFO, cover the financial overview and some concluding remarks from Andrés. We'll have at the end of the session a question- and- answer session. Please save any questions you have until the end. For those of us joining us in person today, you're welcome to stay for lunch after the event. With that, I will turn it over to Andrés.
All right. Well, good morning, everyone. It's really great to see so many friends here in person. Our last investor day was in 2021, so it was virtual. You'll remember some of the topics that we talked about. What we'll be doing is talking about the big picture, how we see the market opportunities, and then you'll have our executive team go through in much more detail. What I'd like to do is sort of give you how we see the big picture of the business right now. What we talked about in 2021, sort of living through a once-in-a-lifetime transformation of the energy sector, everything we said back then has come true but actually accelerated even more. What we said that we were going to do, we did and a little bit more. What is the sort of big setting?
Right now, about 70 countries, more than two-thirds of the world's GDP, have net zero targets by 2050. This is enormous market. There's never been anything like it in the electric sector. To think of something comparable, it's really sort of the digital revolution in telecoms. To meet these goals, you need over $1 trillion of investment, say by 2030. We really have to ramp up. That's a level equivalent to the investments in the oil sector. We have a long ways to go. How do you reduce emissions? A key point is re-electrifying everything. We see 3 times growth in electricity from 2021 through 2050, and one thing we didn't know back in 2021 was the Inflation Reduction Act.
Here you have specifically in the U.S. market earmarked $369 billion for the energy transition. This has made a very important difference in the market that we see going forwards. Again, the energy transition is faster than we had previously thought, and this is the growth just in the markets AES operates in. This is not global. This is in the markets where AES operates in. I think that what's very important, look how much energy storage is growing, and onshore wind, as well as utility-scale solar. The key is that we are uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of the transition. One thing I'd like to emphasize, this is not like going from fossil fuels, 100% renewables. This is not throwing a switch. Okay? This is a transition. A consultant would say it's a journey.
In this journey, what we want to do is maximize value for our shareholders of that journey. That means identifying niches, identifying bottlenecks that can be particularly profitable, and making use of it. That's one of the reasons we have restructured into four new business units. I think what's very important is that these four business units really are synergistic. We work better in any one of them because we have the other ones. First is renewables and really thinking about global renewables. This makes a lot of sense because even though, you know, by far the vast amount of the growth is in the U.S., we're also uniquely serving large corporate clients in other markets like Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.
In some cases, we see interest from, for example, multinationals that we have greened in the mining sector in Chile saying, "Well, what can you do for me in the U.S.?" That makes a lot of sense. Second are utilities. What you will hear from Kristina is that we have, if not the fastest, among the very fastest-growing utilities in the U.S. The reason for that is that in some, I think what's very important, you're finally starting to see economic growth, for example, in Dayton, and very meaningful growth. It has to do, interestingly, from the Inflation Reduction Act. It's building EV factories in Dayton, building battery factories in Dayton, a place that has not seen this kind of economic growth and investment. You're seeing investment in Indiana as well. We also, in both cases, have the lowest tariffs in the state.
We can do a lot of investments, we'll be talking about that, and at the same time, keep our tariffs competitive. We have what we've called energy infrastructure, and this is very important. Energy infrastructure is basically our fossil plants as well as our LNG infrastructure. Renewables, you know, are the future, zero carbon, growing extraordinarily fast, but they don't provide dispatchable energy. They don't provide 24/7. That's what the grid needs. That's what our clients, many cases, need. We see LNG, natural gas, being that transition fuel, and very important. By having renewables and the energy infrastructure, it allow us to better serve the grid, better serve our clients, and also maximize value. We have a lot of embedded asymmetrical optionality in our energy infrastructure.
Of course, we are going to be exiting coal by the end of 2025, so you will see in some of the numbers, those markets, that contribution is shrinking. One thing is, what we're seeing is there's tremendous option value in these sites to repower, to put in energy storage. You will be seeing our green hydrogen project. That is adjacent to a decommissioned coal plant. It has water, it has rail, it has interconnection, and also it has advantages under the Inflation Reduction Act. Finally, there's new technologies, and Chris Shelton will be talking about that. What's very important is that that helps us grow in renewables. It also helps our utilities.
You will see, it's amazing what % of new renewables in the U.S. are coming on with energy storage and how important it is, how it allows us to see things perhaps that are not obvious to others. You will see the Ultrastack, which is a way of boosting the grid using energy storage. If you think about just renewables, we're among the fastest-growing renewable companies. We have about 15 GW in operation. By 2027, we should have between 40 and 45 GW, it's around 3 times growth. Of that growth, 11 GW is current backlog, and of that backlog, about 6 GW is being built. These are PPAs that are signed. We have a pretty strict definition of what's backlog. We expect between now and 2027 to have another 14-19 GW. This is among the fastest growth rates.
One of the things I think you'll be pleasantly surprised today is how fast we're growing in our U.S. utilities. We have a 10% CAGR in our rate base, and our PTC or pre-tax contribution will be growing even faster. I think in new technologies, we've established ourselves as a leader. Here are some of the ones I think that are most interesting. You all know Fluence. Fluence is key. They will be having their earnings call, I think on Thursday, they'll be giving you more information. It's clear that energy storage is a huge market, and it's also clear that this is very important for us to maximize value in this transition. You have Uplight, which is cloud-based energy efficiency services. It covers about 80% of 80 U.S. electric and gas utilities.
You have 5B, which is prefab solar. We'll be talking about that. One of our innovations was really supplying data centers with 24/7 carbon-free energy. This, quite frankly, helps us. This knowledge that we've gathered helps us, for example, with green hydrogen. You will see that our green hydrogen project is hourly matched because it's a similar problem to optimize as supplying carbon-free energy for a data center. We have Atlas, which we're just starting to do now, do some tests, that is using robots to help build solar farms. That helps both with the labor shortages, it's also going to be much more efficient. Again, the transition, we see it as a decade-long process, at least. We'll continue to create value from our existing infrastructure.
You know, we had a very successful year in 2022, redirecting LNG supplies to Europe to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity. That's just one example, but we have a lot of embedded asymmetrical options. Let's take a moment. What will AES look like at the end of this period in 2027? The first is in terms of GW, we'll almost double. We'll go from 32 GW of installed capacity to around 57, 62. The biggest change you'll see, we'll go from 20% of the capacity being coal to 0. We'll be almost 80% renewables and about 20% gas. Here is, you know, where the rubber hits the road. What are your earnings per share going to be?
We commit to the growth rate that we set out in 2020 to grow 7%-9% our earnings through 2025. What we're providing new today is from 2023, from today's, this year's earnings through 2027, we'll be growing 6%-8%. What's sort of the big picture here? If you think about renewables, and here we're looking at Adjusted EBITDA, which is a new number we're providing to provide greater transparency into the new business unit, they'll be growing around 20%. It's a very rapid rate of growth. If you think about the utilities, they're going to, their Adjusted EBITDA is going to be growing around 13%. When you think about Energy Infrastructure, it's contracting around 16%. Basically that is the retirement of the coal plants.
That is what's happening on the EBITDA level. I think we've shown an ability to really maximize the value of these assets. You know, just when you think about, you know, we were in many countries, we're in a lot less today. I think we optimized the value of selling those countries, redeploying that capital. We're doing the same with our coal assets. As I said, I think a lot of these facilities do really have a very interesting repowering option of different kinds. What's our track record over the last five years?
We've grown our Adjusted EBITDA 9% per year from 2017 through 2022. We've grown our parent free cash flow 7%, and we've grown our dividend 6%. I think we have a good basis, a good track record for these projections going forward, and we absolutely intend to meet them. With that, I'd like to pass the word to Ricardo Falú, who's our Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here with all of you in person as Andrés mentioned. I'm eager to share with you all our growth strategy for our company to continue delivering the highest sustainable total shareholder return by creating value for all our stakeholders. As Andrés mentioned, the energy transition is happening even faster than what we originally thought, and we are, as at AES, uniquely positioned to fully capture the value of this transition. Today, approximately 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions are linked or associated with the energy we as humankind need or use. We think that roughly half of the emissions come from the way we produce electricity, the power sector, our sector. Transportation and heavy industry make up most of the rest.
Really we have a unique opportunity in front of us to lead this transition in a sector that can make a significant difference, not only to decarbonize the way we produce electricity, but also help hard-to-decarbonize sectors go green. Our strategy sets our company on the path to lead the green transition by becoming the energy solution partner of choice. We have embedded a holistic 360-degree view of all our stakeholders at the core of our strategy. Not only for people to recognize AES, but really to have our vision resonate with them to the point they want to work with us. We want to continue to be the energy solution provider of choice for our customers as we continue co-creating solutions tailored to their needs.
We want to continue to be the company of choice for our investors as we deliver or continue delivering the largest value. Continue to be the strategic partner of choice for the supplier or our suppliers in our integrated and reliable supply chain, and the trusted advisor for the regulators as we bring market knowledge and global experience to the regulatory discussions. We have defined three simple guiding principles for the execution of our strategy. Number one is our ability to green our customers, measured in terms of our carbon-free Adjusted EBITDA. By 2027, 45% of our Adjusted EBITDA will come from our renewables business, compared to 25% in 2023. Our utilities business, which is low carbon emission segment, will increase from 22% to 32% by the end of 2027. As a result of greening our customers, we will be decarbonizing our portfolio.
By the end of this year, 46% of our portfolio capacity in terms of installed capacity will be renewable, and by the end of 2027, 82% of our capacity will be emissions-free. Finally, we will be focusing all our efforts primarily on the U.S., which is our premier market of growth. 85% of our equity will be invested here in the States. I think it's very important to know, though, that virtually 100% of our equity investments will be in long-term U.S. dollar denominated renewable PPAs for our projects with creditworthy counterparties. These 2027 strategic objectives that we have just discussed guide us on our journey towards zero.
We are on track to execute or deliver on our intention to exit coal by the end of 2025 and achieve net zero carbon emissions from electricity sales by 2040. I'll give you or I want to give you know, a high-level overview of our strategic actions for the next five years. The first one is our renewable growth. As Andrés mentioned, we are planning to increase our renewables portfolio 3x over, reaching between 40 and 45 GW of renewables capacity by the end of 2027. When it comes to utilities, over the next five years, we will be investing $5 billion or over $5 billion in our U.S. utility companies.
We are exiting coal by the end of 2025. As this is a transition, we of course will continue to maximize the value out of the gas and LNG businesses. Last but not least, we will roll out our green hydrogen projects to help transportation and heavy industry replace fossil fuels with green hydrogen. To reach 40-45 GW of renewable capacity by the end of 2027, we need to add approximately 25-30 GW of renewable to our portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, 85% of our equity investments will be here in the States. Outside the US, we are growing, you know, in 3 primary markets, Chile, Mexico and Brazil, under long-term contracts in US dollar with creditworthy counterparties. On this slide, you can see the $5 billion investment program we have for AES Indiana and AES Ohio.
As you all know, these utilities provide very stable and steady or predictable cash flows, but also they offer unique and very attractive opportunities for profitable growth. With our $5 billion investment plan that we will execute over the next five years, we will be growing or the rate base of these two businesses combined will be growing at a CAGR of 10%. As Andrés mentioned, this is one, if not the highest growth in the sector. We have a well-advanced program, and Juan Ignacio will be speaking more about this later today, but a very well-advanced program to accomplish our intention to exit coal by the end of 2025. We have secure plans for approximately 41% of our 7.1 gigawatt of coal that we currently have and are in the process of selling our 1.2 gigawatt coal plant in Vietnam.
We are also making progress for the remaining 42%, and we will be making announcements as these plans crystallize. When it comes to green hydrogen, we are working on the largest green hydrogen project in the U.S. together with our partner and offtaker, Air Products. Important to note that this project will receive the full $3 per kilogram that the Inflation Reduction Act provides as an incentive, as this project will have or will be hourly matched, co-located new renewable capacity that will make this project one, if not the most competitive in the nation. We are also developing, I would say, a world-class green hydrogen platform. Currently have approximately 800 metric tons per day of pipeline, which includes our projects in the U.S., our project in Chile, and in Brazil.
Chris Shelton will also, you know, will talk about this in more detail later today. Now, I would like to introduce you to our competitive advantages that ensure that we will succeed in the execution of our strategy. We have been developing a best-in-class green growth platform with very robust pipeline of project, with transmission access and all the necessary permits. As a company, we have optimized, standardized, and streamlined our processes and systems to be able to execute our projects on time and on budget. We like to call it our renewables machine, which is really to be able to execute the project very efficiently to deliver them, again, on time and on budget for our customers. As we face a decade-long shortage of the inputs that are required to make our customers green, having a reliable and integrated supply chain differentiates us from our competition.
We will continue to use strategic alliances. We will leverage on our global scale, as well as continue looking opportunities for reshoring or nearshoring. When it comes to strategic partnerships, here we will leverage on the trusted relationships that we have developed over many years with key stakeholders, including corporate customers as well as financial partners. We will of course continue to work hand-in-hand with our corporate customers to co-create solutions tailored to their needs, and also we will continue bringing financial partners to our projects as a way of accessing to low cost of capital for growth to maximize our return. As Andrés mentioned, we have been recognized as a leader when it comes to innovation. Our ability to create smart solutions, integrate technologies, and drive local adoption is crucial to our strategy.
You will hear much more about our competitive advantages and how they enable our transformation as Leo, Juan Ignacio, Kristina, and Chris go through each of the SBU presentation. Over many years, we have developed and currently have unique relationship with customers in these four segments that are the most relevant to accelerate the energy transition, either because they consume the most electricity or because they have the largest CO2 intensity in their portfolio. These relationships, and Leo is going to speak much more about this, but these relationship are the result of the customer-centric mindset and model that we have at AES, where we co-create solutions with our customers tailored to their needs.
Of course, our plan as we execute on this transformation is, you know, very focused on continue supplying our big tech companies to provide the 24/7 solution to their data centers, continue our efforts to green the mining companies even beyond the electricity supply, and help them really replace fossil fuel in their operations. We will also support in these large C&I customers, we will have a focus on the oil and gas companies and support them in their transformations with our renewable and green hydrogen solutions. The total addressable market across these four customer segments is really humongous. It's approximately 5,500 terawatt hour a year, so it's really, really very meaningful or humongous. So is the opportunity for AES to create meaningful value working together.
I think an important note, as I mentioned, you know, already in my presentation, is that all of this growth will come from long-term renewable PPAs denominated in US dollar with creditworthy counterparties. That's our model. That's part of our secret sauce. That's how we grow our business, and that will continue to be the case for the growth that we're presenting today. Let's take a moment to zoom in on one of our customer segment to see how AES has accompanied the mining industry along the energy journey. A little over 10 years ago, Chile's mining sector was booming, as you all know, with the commodities super cycle. However, finding a reliable and competitive source of electricity was a significant obstacle for this company to continue to grow.
AES was there to address the miner's energy need and provide the solution in the form of purpose-built, baseload plants to power the mining expansion projects with reliable energy under long-dated tolling agreements. I'm sure you are all very familiar with these contracts. Later, as wind, solar, and batteries became competitive, AES approached this customer and offer its Green Blend and Extend solution to green the electricity supply of these mines to achieve 2 goals. 1 was to reduce the operating cost of the mine, or what's called the cash cost of these operations, and 2, to reduce their emissions. Over the last 4 years, we have transformed all of these tolling agreements into long-term renewable PPAs, an example of how we have helped all these companies to green their electricity supply.
We are now exploring ways for AES to go beyond the electricity supply or the power supply to help them replace fossil fuels in their operations with green hydrogen. To summarize just 3 main ideas or the key takeaways I would like you to take with from this presentation. First is that our strategy sets our company on the path to lead the green transition, this energy transition that Andrés mentioned earlier, and how we plan to lead by becoming the energy solution partner of choice. We have, and Steve and the rest of the team will go into the details of our growth plan, but we have laid out a plan to grow our renewables and utility businesses and transform our company faster than our competition. Second, decarbonization is not only about shutting down coal assets. It's actually a two-part equation.
We do have an accelerated plan to phase out coal or exit coal by the end of 2025, we will ensure we continue to provide the reliability the system needs as we bring more and more renewables and energy storage to the grid. Finally, our competitive advantages enable us or ensure that we will succeed in the execution of our strategy to continue delivering the highest sustainable total shareholder return by creating value for all our stakeholders on this journey towards a carbon-free energy future. Thanks for your attention. I'll now pass it over to Leo Moreno, President of our AES Clean Energy business, who will present our SPU or renewables SPU growth plans. Thank you.
Thanks. Good morning. It's good to see everyone. I'm very excited to share today our strategy and outlook for our high-growth renewables business unit. First, just a quick overview on what this business unit is. We have 26 GW between assets and operations in our backlog. About 15 GW of that is in operations, and 11.3 GW is the backlog. You can see the chart on the left, that's the split between different technologies in different countries. We'll spend most of the time today talking about our backlog and the growth. What is this backlog? 90% U.S. dollar denominated, 19-year average PPA life, 50% of the customers are multinational corporations, and 85% of the renewable investments, the equity is expected to go into the U.S. Before I go deeper into our strategy, just a couple pages on the market outlook and opportunity.
Andrés had a summary of this page. The takeaway is that in our markets, we expect to have 900 GW of renewables being added between now and 2030. As you can see on the chart, about half of that is solar, and the balance is wind and energy storage. We really believe that as solar penetrates these markets more, that energy storage piece can be much bigger. We are a leader in energy storage, so we can capitalize on that. Now, our main market is the U.S. If you look at the U.S., in the past couple years, we've been stable. We've had about 30 GW of renewables being added in the past two years, and that's what we had in PPAs and CODs.
With the IRA, most research analysts and us, we believe that this can ramp up to the 70 to 80 GW level in the next five years. This is our addressable market. As we grow our pipeline, as we leverage our competitive advantages, we can take a share of this growth. I'll talk more about these competitive advantages over the course of the presentation. I wanted to take 1 minute to go deeper into the IRA. I want to share the market upside from the IRA, and also why we think we're better positioned to take advantage of that. The first element of the IRA is the energy communities, and that is a huge upside for projects across the country because projects that were not economic will now become economic for customers. The energy communities bonus is a 10% additional ITC.
That's 10% on all the CapEx, that really improves the economics of projects. How are we positioned to take advantage of that? A big part of our pipeline is in energy communities. I'll have a slide in the next slide, I'll talk more about that. The second portion is the ITC/PTC. This is the bulk of the IRA, this gives a lot of stability to our growth in the next 10 years. How are we positioned for this? Our pipeline is enormous. We have 51 GW in the pipeline today, that is growing every day. The hydrogen PTC is another big part of the IRA that'll come into play later in the 2026, 2027, 2028 timeframe, the $3 per kilogram is very relevant. How are we positioned for that?
Our Air Products project really put us in the lead, put us on the map. All stakeholders and customers in the U.S. are coming to talk to us because we took this leadership position. We have directed our pipeline to be hydrogen-focused as well in the future. The storage ITC and these standalone projects were really disadvantaged in the U.S. in the past few years because they didn't get ITC, and we have a large pipeline of projects that are standalone, this will really increase the amount of storage being deployed in the market, and with our leadership position and just the number of standalone projects we have out there, we're well positioned to capitalize on that. Lastly, the domestic content. In domestic content, we really have two types of incentives.
We have the advanced manufacturing incentives that, per element of the value chain, they provide incentives for suppliers to move the manufacturing to the U.S., and you have a 10% incremental ITC if you have domestic content. That 10% is very, very relevant. How do we take advantage of that? We were the early movers in this. In June 2022, we announced the US Buyers Consortium, US Solar Buyer Consortium for up to 6 GW a year of supply. We have been talking to 20 to 25 suppliers over the last year on moving these factors to the U.S. We feel very well positioned to capitalize on this once that guidance, the Treasury guidance comes out. This is the picture of our projects to go deeper into the energy communities aspect of it.
These are the areas that in the U.S. that we expect the energy communities will be. Each green dot here is one of our projects. We have 400 projects across 40-plus states in the U.S. Our pipeline is very diverse. As you can see, about 30% of that falls in energy communities. These projects are really well positioned to be contracted at attractive returns. Now let's talk about our strategy. These are the things that we think makes us unique. These are the things that we think makes us differentiated versus our competitors. Through this presentation, I'll go deeper into each of these 3 things with examples. The number one is the customer intimacy, the unique relationships and insight we have with customers. I'll go deeper into that during the presentation.
The second part is that we sell differentiated products and solutions. We really sell solutions that no one else sells, that puts us in a preferred position with these customers. Lastly is the scale, the way we can leverage the scale that we got to with all of our stakeholders. The first one of these is the customer intimacy, the reality is, in the past two years in the U.S., the share of the market that is taken by corporate customers has been increasing. 3, 4 years ago, the corporate customers were small share of the market, in the past two years, they've grown to be more than 50% of this. We are the leader in this segment. This is supposed to continue, we're the leader in this segment.
The past two years, we've been ranked number one by BNEF, a seller of clean energy to corporates, as you can see on their own chart, a wide margin versus the number 2 player. The way we did this is really by understanding the customer's business and providing something that really tailored to their needs. We have a completely decommoditized product, whereas most of our competitors sell a commodity, PPA from a solar farm, PPA from a wind farm. That's how we got to this leadership position. What does this insight give us? This is what happened in the past few years with AES. In the 2019/2020 timeframe, we had signed 5.8 GW of PPAs. Once we accelerated this customer insight and tailoring solutions to customers, we announced our Google partnership in 2020.
We signed the first agreement with Google early 2021, this is what happened. We signed 10.1 GW in the next two years. We almost doubled the pace of growth by changing our strategy. The results are on the right. 64% of our contracts in the 3 years have been with corporate partners. As this corporate market increases, we can leverage this advantage to be even bigger in that market. With these customers, we also have a differentiated reputation with execution. Where does that come from? It comes from a few things. Number one, we have been delivering the projects. As you can see on the chart on the left, we tripled the amount of CODs that we were doing between the 17-19 period to 2022.
Customers see that we're delivering the projects as expected. Secondly, very importantly, while all the developers in the U.S. were walking away from PPAs because the economics didn't work or because of supply chain or many reasons, we are honoring all of our PPAs. All of our corporate customers, we have honored the PPAs to deliver the projects. This created a really differentiated reputation for AES in the market. Many customers come to us and say, "This developer is not delivering. We wanna do something with somebody that delivers." That leads to a bilateral relationship between AES and that customer. This execution is gonna increase even more in the future years. As we can see here, 4 times more, we expect to deliver 14 GW of CODs in the 2023-2025 period.
In this relationship and perception from customers, we have hard data to show this perception. On the right, we have our Net Promoter Score. This is a survey we did with 300 respondents among our customers. This is a metric that is very used in industries that are customer-focused. It's not very common in our industry because most people are not that customer-focused. We are customer-focused. We care. In this, in our industry, the benchmark for Net Promoter Score is 58. We are at 70. This 70 is an A+. How does this work? For Net Promoter Score, if people rate you a 9 or a 10 out of 10, you get a point. If they rate you 6 or below, you detract a point.
To get to 70, you really need 80% or 90% of your customers to be rating you a 9 or a 10. This is the result and the hard data that shows how these customers see us, and this has been improving over time as well. We're very proud of this relationship with customers and the brand that we have. The second block of our competitive advantages is the new solutions that we provide. We do sell things that are standard. Some areas of the country, most of the market is regulated, so you have to sell standard PPAs. We do sell that.
We also sell other things that are more value-add products that are tailored to the customer needs, such as our 24/7, such as other customized solutions that can be blocks of carbon-free energy in different times of the day and that are tailored to whatever the load of the customer is. Given our leadership in energy storage, we also provide products that are capacity, which is uncommon in the renewable industry, where you actually provide reliability to the customer. These serve different customers in different ways, let's go a little bit deeper into this. In the customized solution, in the normal market, a renewable player has a single project. They have a solar plant, they have a wind farm, they have a energy storage. At most, they'll have a solar plant with a little bit of energy storage added to it.
What do you do with these projects? You bid into an RFP because this is a commodity. You bid in an RFP that can have 40, 50, 60 projects bidding against you. Whoever has the lowest return wins that RFP. What do we do? We take these projects, we combine them, we add commercial structuring around it, and we sell an outcome to the customer. That outcome can be 24/7 carbon-free energy that can come from 10 different projects that combine multiple outputs from these projects with some more commercial structures to provide that outcome. It can also be, for example, 7 by 16. A lot of customers want 7 days a week, 16 hours a day. In that case, we build a large solar farm, but we combine with a very large energy storage and provide that power 16, 7 by 16.
These tailored transactions, they are bilaterally negotiated with the customer because we're co-creating with them. It is very specific to them. We avoid the world of the commoditized products that most developers are in. This is what makes us unique. We also provide these unique outcomes with engineering innovation. We have many examples, but I'll talk about this one, which is our Waiawa project in the island of Oahu. This is a project that has 60 MW of solar panels, but it only has infrastructure, meaning the inverter and the interconnection, for 30 MW. The infrastructure for this project is very cheap relative to the size of the project, that is 60 MW.
You ask, "Okay, but what do you do with the other 30 megawatts?" Well, we build a very large battery, outsized, it's 30 gigawatt, 30-megawatt battery, 8 hours, which is one of the longest batteries of this size in the world. This battery allows us to stretch the solar power towards the peak hours. Now when the solar goes down, when the sun goes down between 7 and 10 P.M., we're providing the 30 megawatts steady through the peak. This product has a lot more value add to the client than a normal solar farm because you're really providing peak hour capacity. The price becomes economic because the infrastructure is only for 30 megawatts, so you're not wasting anything. We call that a 2-to-1 DC ratio, meaning the size of the solar is double the size of the interconnection.
This is a high value add product for the customer. How does it benefit us? The customer will prefer this type of product, project versus a normal project, so that allows us to capture attractive returns with this type of thing. We can innovate with the customer, both on the commercial side as well as on the engineering side like this one. Chris will talk much more about that, how our innovation system boosts our renewable business, but this is a core part of AES. This is our, in our DNA, innovation. The third part of our competitive advantages is really our scale and execution. Our pipeline, as you can see on the left, is 51 GW and spread across the U.S., 40 markets, but we really focus on some markets where we think we're differentiated. What are these markets?
These are markets that we have pipelines in excess of 5 GW. That's California, number one. We have a long history in California, and most of our big customers are there. Second is the WECC region. That includes Colorado, Arizona, and the neighboring states. We have also a long track record in those states. That's where our clean energy office's main offices are. PJM, where we have, because it's an unregulated market, we have a big advantage to sign things with the corporate customers. In New York, where we also have a big pipeline, and we also have an advantage because in New York, you have to bring the power from the northern part of New York to the city, and you will need 24/7 to use those transmission lines, and we have an advantage there as well.
We have other markets that are growing markets for us. ERCOT is a growing market, MISO is a growing market, and in Hawaii, we're very big, but it's a smaller market. We really try to tailor our pipeline to the markets where we have a big competitive advantage. As you see on the right, most of our pipeline is solar today with a growing piece of wind and energy storage. As time goes by, we expect the portion of wind and energy storage to grow, especially because once solar penetrates these markets up to a certain extent, 20% or 30%, you need the other technologies to make it 24/7 and to decarbonize the grids. I want to go a little bit deeper into the capabilities that we have, because we really think we have built unique capabilities in this development and construction process.
I'll talk about development, I'll talk about engineering, construction, and procurement. On the development team, our team is very unique. In different areas of development, we have built something that differentiates us. On permitting, we have a very large experienced permitting team, centralized team, that has experience in all these 40 states that we operate in. These are people that are doing work that a lot of developers use consultants for. People are using external capabilities to do their projects, but we have all of that internally. What does that give us? That gives us a way to strategically position the projects in places that we think we can advance them fast. That allows us to efficiently advance these projects through to contracting.
If you look at the number of projects in the queue today, interconnection queues, it's in the 1,000 gigawatt level. A lot of them will never happen because people don't know how to strategically site these projects, and we have this advantage. On the land acquisition, we have a broad team working across all these states, interacting with landowners, and we have unique advantage because we can add more value to the landowner. Most developers are competing for land lease options. The land lease option market is very hot. In an area where you can have good interconnection, where land is, where land is cheap, and the resources are good, these landowners are getting five, six offers from different developers to get their land.
We have the balance sheet and the scale, so we can also buy the land from developers, and we have a large land acquisition program. We actually buy the land from the landowners, and we have that project secure. We do that in large scale. On the real estate side, our team is experienced in multi-stage complex projects. Why does this matter? To develop a project to a financial close, to contract any financial close, you need to make sure that this project is buildable and it's financeable. The diligence around that project is very important. A lot of projects die through this diligence. Our team is really specialized in filtering these projects. Which ones are gonna work, which ones are not gonna work. That gives us an advantage.
Lastly, which is probably one of the most important for us, is interconnection. Our interconnection team is best in class. We really have some of the best professionals in the market, and this allows us to site the projects where we think they will actually be built. These are the reason that most of the projects die. Because at the end of the day, it costs too much to interconnect that project or because other projects won't be interconnected in that area, therefore, it's not worth building the interconnection just for your project. An understanding on how each of the hubs and each of the lines in the U.S. are gonna develop over time is critical for that strategic development. We have a team that can do that, and our cost estimation is very good.
When we put a number in our models, later when the interconnection studies come back, they usually match what we had because this team is so experienced. This development team, just the growth part of it, is more than 300 professionals in the U.S. today and growing. Let's go to engineering, procurement, and construction, and I'll talk a lot more about these in the other slides. Our engineering team is award-winning. We won Edison Awards for innovation in engineering, like that example for the Hawaii. We are constantly innovating new solutions that involve different technologies on project. We have a lot of that engineering done internally. Our development engineering team is very large, and we take these projects up to 30% design before we contract them.
Whereas other developers may have 10% design, they may have 0% design and just have an estimate. We develop these projects to have that design ready by the time we contract. We have a lot of certainty on delivery of the project, that we can actually deliver as expected and the cost we expect. On the procurement side, I'll talk a lot more, we have economies of scale and this strategic approach with suppliers with master agreements. We are not, like most developers, doing one-off projects. We're doing master agreements with suppliers that are strategic for them, strategic for us. On the construction side, we have the relationships with EPC firms, and we use the same EPC firm for multiple projects. That provides certainty to them, more attractive terms for us.
That allows our scale also allows a portfolio management approach to projects. We are not doing one project in Virginia. We're doing a portfolio of 5 GW of development, 1-2 GW of construction, and that portfolio management in one state has a lot of advantages of scale. Let me walk you through one example where this, these things really come to life. This is a project we have in Pinal County in Arizona. East Line, Central Line, West Line. When we went into this project, we secured a 300 MW interconnection position, which is very large for that area. Is interconnection position that is larger than there was customer demand at that time. Why do we secure that large interconnection position? Because we crowd out competitors. Now our interconnection is so large that other people can't come in at that point.
We're securing all the land around that interconnection to make sure that also we prevent, we create a moat around our business for that area. We know that we can't contract the entire project immediately, but that over time, we will be able to contract this project. In the first year, 2021, we achieved COD for the first portion of this project that we contracted with SRP. At that point, in the middle of that construction, we're now contracting the second portion of the project. We're contracting the second 100 megawatts. When we finish the construction of the first project, the same crews that were working on that, they go to the second stage because the EPC knows that these people will be there for three or four years.
Those crews are now there for a long term, for 3 to 4 years. We really use that efficiency of keeping the same EPC. We do the third stage, the crews move to the third stage, and by the time we build it all, there is customer demand. This is serving 33 customers. We really optimize all the scale around it and create a moat around our business for our competitors. This is another example of how these things come together, is when we acquired projects that are other people's projects. This is a case of a project in Mississippi owned by Vestas.
Vestas was developing this project, and this is an area that is low wind speeds, but that Vestas is trying to deploy a new turbine technology, larger rotors, higher towers, and the density of wind in this area is actually higher than in other places, so even with low wind speeds, you can get good output. Vestas was developing this project, but it was not contracted. We came in, we bought the project from Vestas. We advanced the conversation with the customer. This is one of our 3 major customers. It's a large, tech player. Vestas, we add value to all the players here. Vestas is able to get the project done because they want to deploy the equipment.
The customer gets the output of this project with a supplier that they really trust, which is us, because we already have that relationship. We very quickly advanced this project to NTP. Within 6 months of our acquisition, we had taken this project to NTP. This is another way that we use these capabilities, the customer and the scale, to really create a competitive advantage out there, even when we're using other people's projects. In supply chain, we have strategic alliances, we have long-term relationships rather than one-off. A normal developer will sign a PPA, go to a project, try to get supply for that project. They have unfavorable terms versus us. They don't have the best price, and they're not going to have priority once their suppliers faces challenges.
If a supplier is facing challenges passing panels, they're not gonna cut supply to the player that has a gigawatt contract with them. They will cut with the people that have a 100 megawatts contract with them. Second, the terms. The terms under these master agreements, they're necessarily gonna be way more attractive because the suppliers can make investment decisions based on your contracts. They can increase the size of their factories. They have certainty of delivery, right? They know that over time, they can ramp up their production, and we will be there. Lastly, on the onshoring, this gives us an advantage as well because the magnitude that we got to is enough for a supplier to make a decision on an entire US factory. We become the anchor customer.
It may be one-third of the capacity of the factory, but is enough for them to make the decision on the entire factory. We have an advantage on that as well. This is how this comes to life. Today in the U.S., the average project size for solar is about 69 megawatts. The developers are going to procure this small amount of panels. That is one contract with suppliers among dozens of contract that suppliers have. Our approach is we're going for 500 to a gigawatt at a time with these suppliers. We get, again, the favorite terms, price, and the priority. This is a picture actually of our Spotsylvania project in Virginia. A lot of people thought this project would never be built because it's so large. It's over 600 megawatts, the largest project on the East Coast.
It demonstrates a little bit this, the scale that we got to and how we leverage these relationships. We also have this advantage of scale in our capital structure. I tried to outline here a little bit the stages of our project. We have stage where we're securing equipment, we have construction leading to financial close, and we have operations. What have we done to leverage our scale in these different stages of the project? On the equipment, we have a very large accounts payable program. Today, it's $600 million, growing. That is the normal trade payables program, but at large scale for us. We are able to procure equipment ahead of time without committing equity. This is something that, again, other developers don't do. They procure equipment after they sign the PPA.
This creates a big advantage for us without committing equity. How are we able to do this? Our financing parties really trust us, and they know our scale, and they know that we honor our commitments, so we can get these types of facilities. We go to construction. We have a construction warehouse. Most players out there are financing construction with a specific construction facility for one project. We created this warehouse. Today, it's $1.7 billion. When we start, we sign a PPA, and we start spending money on that project, either limited notice to proceed to notice to proceed, money comes from the construction warehouse. That is a seamless way to get money.
The money is available without any friction, without having to sign more documents, and it's secured by the portfolio of projects that we have. It's a very low cost, efficient way of getting the construction done. Doesn't slow down our project at all. When we get to financial close, we did an industry-leading transaction, the master indenture. We're expecting to have $2 billion-$3 billion per indenture, and this was very unique in the renewable space. It was the first done in our space. It is common in other industries, but it's not common in the renewable space. This is permanent financing. Now we have a lot of banks signed up to this master indenture, and we have to get permanent financing for a project we get under the terms of the master indenture. We also get a seamless way to fund the project.
We have more attractive terms, standard terms, low cost, low friction with our team. On the tax equity side, as these benefits grow very fast, they're already growing, but they will grow even more once we have the renewables that support hydrogen coming online. The tax equity market is getting strained and will get more strained. For us, that hasn't been a problem at all because we have the deep relationships with these tax equity partners. They're used to committing large scale pools of money to us, and we have repeatable structures with them. For us, the tax equity. We have an advantage versus other people because we have so much access to the tax equity market. Lastly, our sell down structure. We sell down projects to optimize our returns.
The way we're doing this, we selected a few preferred partners. We just announced the transaction with Hannon Armstrong recently, we have a few select partners that we also have standard terms with them. When we sell down, there is competition because we have a few partners, but it's also seamless transaction because we're executing on the terms that were already negotiated, governance and everything. All complications that come with sell down, they don't exist for us, we do that as also as a portfolio. We do large scale sell downs instead of project sell downs. Putting it all together. How do we create value? How do we have an advantage here? We start with a single project that has normal market returns. This will be a project that in the market will be commoditized.
We have our benefits of procuring at scale that make each project more attractive. We have all these capital structure benefits, optimization sell downs. We have these commercial structuring co-creation with our customers. That's what allows us to get the 10%-13% U.S. returns and 14%-17% international. When the entire market has been squeezed in returns due to supply chain issues, due to a very competitive environment, we're able to keep that because of our advantage. To wrap up, reiterating what Andrés and Ricardo said, this is what we plan to do, right? We plan to be a business unit that has 40-45 GW by 2027. Takeaways, attractive growth business line, long-term contracted, dollar-denominated, focused on the U.S. and these high-quality customers.
IRA, significant upside, and we're well positioned to capture that. We have these unique advantages around the customer insight and relationships, the differentiated solutions and scale, and we expect to add the 40 to 45 GW by 2007 with attractive returns. Thank you so much. Let me turn it over now to Juan Ignacio to talk about our Energy Infrastructure business unit.
Thank you, Leo. Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to be here with you today. I'm Juan Ignacio. I'm currently leading the infra business unit, which is, I would say, a very critical for our journey, the one that Andrés already mentioned. Why it's so relevant or critical, I think it's the right complement of what Leo has laid out before, because this is the dispatchable energy component of the transition. As everybody knows, we live, we have to deal with this famous trilemma, this combination of sustainability, reliability and affordability. This particular segment has to do with providing the reliability needed of our customers in order to get supply 24/7 with power especially for their businesses.
That's why it's very relevant and actually, what's our focus in order to make sure that we really deliver what our customer needs, especially during this journey, is basically to make sure that we can really supply that security of supply, that reliability, in order for them to get the quality of solutions they need in order to transition their businesses. This security of supply would enable the growth in renewables, but at the same time would provide the flexibility the different market needs in order to transition their operations into a more sustainable environment. Secondly, we are gonna be focusing on continue maximizing the value of our gas and LNG infra businesses, especially during the transition, taking advantage of the asymmetric option value we have embedded into our contracts.
We're gonna discuss a little bit more about few examples on how this asymmetric option value works, and we're gonna share a few examples, especially in gas generation assets and in the LNG infra business. Thirdly, of course, we keep on track on phasing out our coal portfolio, right? Intended to be phased out by the end of 2025, and making sure we can really create and add value during this process over time. Let's talk a bit about our portfolio. Our portfolio is comprised of basically three main, I would say, buckets of value. The first one is our gas generation fleet, which is 8.4 GW of gas generating assets.
Roughly 50% of it is in the U.S., in Southland, in California. We have our LNG infrastructure that is the largest import LNG infrastructure of U.S. gas in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirdly, our coal fleet, the 7.1 remaining capacity that we are phasing out over the next two years. Getting into the details in our gas business, gas and LNG, this is a source of earnings and cash flow for our company. They provide, of course, steady earnings and cash flows, but at the same time, the beauty of this particular portfolio is that it comes with a real asymmetric option value.
That has to do with our PPAs and now our LNG contracts that both of them have embedded options that allows us to capture upsides whenever the market is in demand, especially the spreads between our contract prices or purchase prices, gas prices, and market prices at any given time. Our generation fleet is highly contracted long-term in US dollars as our colleagues have already talked about that. Our LNG infrastructure is, you know, beyond being a state-of-the-art infrastructure, is the largest and best-positioned facilities in the Caribbean basin. Actually, as I said before, we are still the largest U.S. LNG importer in this region.
An example of our gas generating fleet, we have Southland, which is roughly 45% of our portfolio, that definitely provides the right flexibility that the California market requires, especially to allow this massive penetration of renewables. At the same time, especially with the newest CCGT, we can enjoy or benefit from the potential surplus we can have in the market from time to time, whenever, especially whenever we have a stressed market and prices are relatively high, we can really take advantage of the PPA structure we have in place. That means basically that when the market is higher than our PPA pricing, we can definitely decide to sell to the market.
Otherwise, we would just put the energy to our customers based on our PPAs signed, right? On the other side, another interesting option we have in general in our portfolio across the different businesses is that this journey, as we said before, will take some time. We will not shift overnight from 100% renewable. An example of that was Europe last year, right? That perhaps was very fast, the intent, the attempt to move to a renewable world. Of course, they were not aware of the potential impact of losing firm capacity over time.
That's why in most of our market, and this example in particular, for instance, most of the markets are requiring this particular reliable energy to remain in the system for quite some time until the renewable generation is capable to replace this amount of capacity, and especially making sure that the system is always reliable throughout the year. That's why, for instance, when it comes to our, what we call it the, our legacy assets in Southern California, they have been extending those assets or the life of those assets over the years, right? We just announced a recent re-extension of these assets for three more years. Now they will run until 2026.
That's basically another example why it's very important to make sure that we keep always this balance between energy and capacity, right? This particular situation is we are facing it everywhere where we do business. At the end, I think this is one example of why this particular fleet of assets will continue providing value to to our company, will continue capturing this, you know, option value over time, right? At the end, it's a sort of a natural hedge we have during the transition until we get to meet the ultimate goal of being 100% sustainable. Getting into the LNG business, just a brief overview. As mentioned, we have been developing this portfolio over the last two decades.
We are the largest, as already said, importer of US LNG as of today in the Gulf of Mexico. We have 3 storage tanks, 2 in operations, 1 in Panama, the other one in Dominican Republic. We have the third one that is gonna be commissioned this year in Q3. We're gonna have 3 tanks, storage tanks by the end of the year, which actually is the largest storage LNG capacity in the region. On top of that is the nearest to the US basin. That has an extra value because when it comes to storing US LNG and take advantage of potential arbitrage opportunities, having a storage in the right place will play a key role in the upcoming years. We have, I said, 3 LNG tanks.
We have two terminals. Both of them are 100% flexible, meaning that they can import LNG at the same time that they can export LNG. We can unload and reload vessels, which will give us much more upside value, especially to take advantage of short-term opportunities in the market. We have 90, you know, kilometers of pipelines, especially to connect different, not just our power plants, but also third parties ones. Most of those pipelines are in the Dominican Republic, where we have connected to our facilities more than 2 GW of third-party generation. Over the years, we developed as well the retail business, right?
That's why you see here that we have, as we speak, 3 truck loading LNG terminals, which is basically, you know, terminals where we load trucks and they deliver LNG throughout the different zones. LNG has played a significant role in the transition of these countries. Now we are trying as well to move to neighboring countries to continue doing the same, you know, doing the same thing, which is basically transitioning all these markets from fossil fuels all the way down to renewables. Here you have 2 examples, one in DR, the other one in Panama, where you can realize how the energy mix evolved over the year. When we first got into the DR in the early 2000, the country was basically burning mostly oil derivatives, right?
Nowadays, basically it's gas, renewables, hydro and you see coal. Those are coal units owned by the government of Dominican Republic. Basically most of the, if not all, of the diesel and fuel oil were displaced by the penetration of the LNG in this market. This journey of going from fossil to gas to renewables is a common pattern that we are seeing in most of the markets who are more, I would say, balanced and responsible in having, I would say, just transitions and making sure that they always transitions, sorry, they always transition with the lights on, as they like to say, right? The other example, which is exactly the same model, we replicated in Panama.
We, as we speak, we can say that the fuel oil is practically displaced 100%. They are now counting with this very important, flexible, and reliable energy to continue with their plans of decarbonizing even more the country with more expected renewable penetration. In Panama itself, I would say that on top of bringing this security supply, it helped a lot to counterbalance or balance the hydro exposure they had. In summary, I think that LNG has played a big role in decarbonizing the different markets, and will continue being a transitional fuel towards a more sustainable market. Another example of how we create or take advantage of these asymmetric option, options embedded into our contracts, this is how basically we make money in our LNG business, right? We have two upside potentials.
The first one comes with the spare or idle capacity we have in our storage tanks, right? We still have 45 to 50 terabyte use of excess capacity that we can sell to third parties. That's what we're gonna be focusing over the next few years. Just to remember that the 80% of our storage capacity is contracted in the long run. Our LNG business is a tolling-based business model, so we don't take any commodity risk. We just pass on the commodity risk, and we just charge a tolling fee or an infra fee for the usage of our infrastructure. It's 80% contracted, tolling-based business model with spare capacity to take advantage of the upside in the near terms.
There's another upside, which is basically what we enjoyed last year, or we benefited from last year, which has to do with our options embedded in our LNG contracts. We have, or we're entitled to redirect LNG to anywhere in the world. And by having that option, we may decide to sell or that re-redirect our LNG volumes to a premium market whenever the spread is out there. That's precisely what happened last year, where we benefited from European prices. We got this spread between the European price and Henry Hub, which is the base of our LNG contracts. And that spread was basically what made us last year benefited with more than $200 million by basically moving gas around.
Of course, we, the replacement of that gas, we were able to buy cheap power, replace power in the markets where we displaced, or we re-redirect that LNG. These are the two buckets or drivers of value. The first one is volume-based, which is basically our idle or spare capacity. Another one is basically arbitrage opportunity, taking advantage of our embedded options in the contracts, and of course, our infra flexibility that allows us to move gas around, as I said at the very beginning, that we can load and reload cargos very, very easily. These are the expected plan in terms of growth. You can see here how the market has evolved over the years.
We are expecting to continue growing the market especially because the demand is out there, the infrastructure is out there, and of course, we have a unique positioning in the region, the same than in the different countries, right? In order to replicate this infrastructure, and nowadays would cost perhaps 3 to 4 times than it used to cost due to the recent supply chain issues. Getting into our coal phase out story, I would say that we have been, as you can see here, we've been exiting from this portfolio over the years. We have already phased out roughly 13 GW out of the 20 we had.
We have already planned additional 4.2 GW, and we are gonna be announcing shortly the remaining capacity, how we're gonna be exiting from it, right? As a matter of fact, we are here basically on track to dispose these assets by the end of 2025. 60% of it is already either, you know, in the plans of being sold, like was mentioned in Mong Duong, or a combination of retirement and potential conversions. The remaining 40%, we, you know, it's gonna be announced shortly. I think the message here is that we are on track, we are committed, and we expect to basically exit coal by the end of 2025.
I think that during this journey of phasing out coal, definitely we've been able to really capture and monetize value, especially short-term value, and that has to do precisely with our PPAs. That's another transaction that was recently announced with Warrior Run, which has to do with a PPA buyouts, right? We had another transaction last year in Chile as well with one of our largest customer there. I think this transition of phasing out coal came or come with actually, with value-adding creation, and that's very important for us.
That's why focusing on not just getting rid of the asset, but making sure we can really add value during the process, and not just short-term value like buying out PPAs and making sure we can really end up with win-win solutions because it's not just buying out the PPAs. I think our customers are definitely pushing for that because they really want to accelerate their decarbonization at the same time of benefit from savings during these transactions, right? Warrior Run is one example. There's other examples that we are as well considering. The second I would say bucket of value is something that Andrés mentioned at the very beginning, which has to do with making sure we can really maximize the future option value of the sites we have.
These sites, especially nowadays, that as everybody knows, we have constraints everywhere, not just in the U.S., that has to do with the connection, has to do with access to water, has to do with land, has to do in few regions with the regulatory constraints. Our sites are well, of course, prepared, to welcome new technologies like storage to be capable to receive green hydrogen infrastructure like the Felix project, which, you know, we are benefit from an old coal plant decommission and having access to water, especially water, the connection and land. I think that considering the value that we have in our sites and making sure that we can really transition those sites into the new environment is gonna come with a lot of value.
That's why we believe that it's not just a matter of phasing out coal, it's a matter of how we make and create value throughout this process, not just in the very short term, but also thinking in the future of these sites. Just to wrap up. Our, in our segment, as said before, we are definitely complementing others. We are key in providing the supply, the reliable dispatchable supply, which is a key component and a great complement to our renewable business because this will guarantee a 24/7 solution to our customers.
We will definitely maximize the value of our gas fleet, gas meaning, generating gas assets and LNG infrastructure, especially through this transition, making sure we can always take advantage of this asymmetric option value we have embedded into our businesses. Lastly, confirm that we are on track on phasing out our coal fleet by the end of 2025, with the caveat that we're gonna do this and we continue doing this, creating value through PPA monetizations, but at the same time making sure we can really capture the future value of repurposing our sites. With that, I think that I'm done. Thank you so much. Susan, please.
Thank you, Juan Ignacio. We'll now take a 10-minute break. We'll come back here for the utility presentation. Please feel free. We've got coffee and refreshments outside. All right. Everybody, if you could please take your seats. We're going to start again.
Great. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kristina Lund, and I am president of our Utilities SBU. I like to say that our utilities are the front lines of the energy transition. For the past century, our people have been working really hard to provide our customers with reliable and affordable electricity service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This century-old business is changing rapidly. We are going to implement new technologies all the way through our value chain. We like to measure our strategic progress along 4 dimensions. The first is customers. We want to create value for our customers today so that they will partner with us for the energy services of the future. Secondly, smart grid. The grid of the future will be highly automated and optimized based on data analytics, and this is really changing the way that we operate.
Thirdly is sustainability. AES is a leader in sustainability, and we have been driving down carbon emissions very rapidly in our US utilities. It's essential that we maintain that reliability and affordability that our customers rely upon. Finally, workforce of the future. We have 3,300 employees in our utilities, and every single job will be done differently because of new technologies. What is really exciting about this is that this strategy has the opportunity for significant capital investment, which is going to drive superior returns for our shareholders. We are on a path to become a premium US utility platform, and I will be speaking mostly about the US today. What's driving this?
First of all, we all know that the industry is growing because of the federal incentives for renewables and grid resilience, and that the industry really needs a lot of investment. We have some very specific opportunities that differentiate us from the rest of the industry. The first is that our infrastructure needs more replacement than some of our peers. I'll talk about that in a moment. We also are the lowest cost provider in each of our markets, and so we can grow faster while maintaining affordability for our customers. What does this mean? We expect 17%-20% average annual growth in earnings and cash flow over the next five years.
Leo mentioned that he is really excited to talk about his high-growth business unit, but I am very happy to be talking to you about these growth rates in the utility side of our business. Before I go into the basics of our utilities, I just wanna speak for a moment about what is happening right now in our markets. Dayton, Ohio, has had a very rough couple of decades. We all know about, you know, manufacturing jobs leaving the United States, and Dayton, in particular, has been more challenged than other parts of Ohio. The great news is it is a new day. Honda has announced that it is building its EV hub in West Central Ohio in our service territory.
What this includes is a $4 billion investment in a new battery module manufacturing facility, and they're doing that in partnership with LG Energy. They're retooling some of their existing assembly plants from ICE to electric vehicles. Honda's EV hub, right in our service territory. This is awesome. What's great is that it's gonna have follow-on investment too. We've had a lot of suppliers looking at different locations for co-locating near the Honda new facility. This is great for Dayton. It's a new day. Indiana, similarly, has been having a lot of growth. What's pictured on this slide is an innovation district called LEAP, which is in between Indianapolis and Lafayette, which is where Purdue University is located. This LEAP district is intended to bring together a lot of industries to kind of consolidate innovation.
Eli Lilly, which is one of our largest customers, is the anchor customer for this investment, nearly $4 billion, 700 jobs. This is a great time in the Midwest, and it's a moment that we have not seen in a very long time. As Andrés mentioned in the beginning, it's really the energy transition that is now affecting other parts of our economy, such as the automotive sector. There's a lot of synergistic kind of growth and focus on sustainability in ways that have not been present until now. It's very exciting. Just a moment on AES Indiana in case you're not familiar. We serve the capital city of Indianapolis, about 500,000 customers total, and we are a vertically integrated utility.
We own or operate 4 GW of generation in operations and construction, and you can see them located throughout the state on the slide there. Turning to Ohio, our Ohio business also has 500,000 customers, but we serve the city of Dayton and then 6,000 sq mi in West Central Ohio. We have a mix of urban and rural in Ohio. In Ohio, generation is deregulated, and we just provide transmission and distribution services to our regulated customers. Now I wanna talk about how we're differentiated from the industry. The industry is generally replacing aging infrastructure. In our business, we are actually more depreciated than our peers by 1.5-2 times in the network side of our business, transmission and distribution. Why is this?
In Indiana, we've actually been focusing on generation with a lot of our investments for the past decade. We've invested $1 billion in different parts of our generation fleet. On the Ohio side, the business was over-levered, for a decade, we've been paying down debt. We actually have paid down $1 billion of debt in the Ohio business. Now we have reached the point where we're going to grow, which is going to help our credit metrics in the future. The reason we're comfortable with doing that now is because of the constructive regulatory mechanisms that I will talk about in a moment. We do have this differentiated opportunity because we have more infrastructure that needs to be replaced than our peer utilities.
The other important thing is that we are the lowest cost provider for residential customers in both states. In Indiana, we would have to increase our rates by 12% before we would reach the state average tariff. In Ohio, on the T&D side, we would have to increase our rates by 55% to reach the state level average. Again, we're going to maintain affordability and grow faster than our peers because of our starting position as the lowest cost provider. Really, the opportunity is enormous. If you look at how much investment it would take to get us up to that state average, it's $6.2 billion of investment potential across both states, or what we call headroom, compared to our peers. Now just a few comments on sustainability in Indiana.
This slide has some recent regulatory outcomes, but the 2 most recent ones are related to our investment in renewables. In 2021, we received investment approvals from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to own and operate 500 megawatts of solar and battery energy storage. Those projects are in advanced development and construction. More recently, in December of 2022, we filed our latest integrated resource plan, and that really calls for us to do 2 things. The first is that we're going to convert our 2 remaining coal units at Petersburg to natural gas, and we are doing that in a very low-cost way because there is already a gas pipeline on site, and we are using the existing infrastructure for the converted plant.
Secondly, we are adding 1.3 GW of solar, wind, and storage to our portfolio, and that's about a third of the size of our portfolio. This is a very large procurement effort. AES Indiana has been taking very thoughtful steps towards sustainability over the last 10 years. What you can see on this chart is the changes in technology over the past 10 years. Coal is going from 2.6 GW down to 0 by the end of 2025, and we will be the first utility in Indiana to exit coal. What you can see is that gas capacity and renewables are growing very rapidly.
An important note about that gas capacity is that, like I mentioned, we're converting existing plants to gas in a very low-cost way, still using all of these existing infrastructure on site, but cutting the carbon footprint significantly. Also, those gas plants are really more like flexible peakers because they're gonna run when the renewable energy isn't available. What does this mean then for sustainability? We expect to reduce our carbon intensity by two-thirds over just a little bit more than 10 years. For a 100-year-old company to achieve that kind of transformation on sustainability is pretty remarkable, and it's something we're very proud of. Now on Ohio, let's talk about the regulatory mechanisms that we have in place, 'cause this is a game changer for our business.
We have been, over the past several years, working with our stakeholders on a number of regulatory outcomes. The most important one is the filing that we made just a couple weeks ago for the settlement of our ESP 4, Electric Security Plan number 4. What this allows is that we can invest up to $500 million under a distribution investment rider, which allows us to track on a quarterly basis the investments that we've made and to update those through rates. We're essentially getting, you know, only a 90-day delay on our distribution investments. For us, that is a very significant de-risking of the business.
If you look at our Ohio portfolio overall, 90% of the capital that we intend to invest in the next five years will be recovered from quarterly trackers, FERC formula rates, or base rates that have already been approved. That's a remarkable de-risking of the investment plan. Now let's step back and just think about the segment overall. We show $5.2 billion of utility CapEx over the next five years. There is about $200 million in El Salvador. We own a portfolio in El Salvador that serves 1.5 million customers. That business is in a dollar-based economy, and it's a very stable but small portion of the segment, and our expectation is that it will remain stable and small through this period.
95% of our investment is going into the US utilities platform, it is very de-risked, as I've already mentioned. 90% of the US investments are going to be recovered through those riders and formula rates, 80% of it is already approved by regulators. Just a little bit of detail on Indiana. You can see the pie chart on the bottom left. $850 million is going into grid modernization, again, that's what I mentioned at the beginning of this, where we are more depreciated than our peers on the T&D asset base. We also have significant renewables investments that I mentioned because of the IRP.
I will say there is potentially some upside to this number because we have procurements out in the market right now for the next wave of renewable procurements that aren't in here. Finally, the $1.4 billion of existing T&D and generation CapEx, that's really covered mostly through the approved rates that we have in place. Again, you know, 80% of this is already approved by regulators. On Ohio, we have $2 billion planned, and I do wanna just note for a moment that because we were not investing in the network for the last 10 years, a lot of this investment is kind of basic blocking and tackling. It's investments that other utilities have already made. For example, EEI estimates that 75% of utility customers in the United States already have smart meters.
Our customers in Ohio are among the small portion of customers that don't have them yet. We've actually just started now deploying smart meters for the first time in Ohio. It's these kinds of technological investments that are very well understood and very, you know, widely deployed throughout the industry that we are now catching up on. This catch-up opportunity is very significant. Again, the distribution investment rider, smart grid, that's about $1 billion. We have nearly $800 million planned for transmission under the FERC formula rates, and then just a small portion that would be recovered under rate cases in the future. That's, that's a very small portion. Again, and as a reminder, we actually did just get a rate order in December of last year, so we know when those rates are coming.
Finally, three quarters of this investment has already been approved by regulators. This is a 10% annual average growth rate in our rate base over the next five years. For the utility segment, this is a differentiated growth rate. We're very excited about this moment for the business. What this leads to for the segment is a growth rate in both earnings and cash flow that is about 20% over the next five years. This is highly differentiated compared to our peers. In summary, we're really pleased to be sharing the projections that our utility segment will grow by roughly 20% over the next five years.
It's because of our differentiated, really unique position in the industry with our low cost status and the need for infrastructure investment in our networks that's creating this opportunity. In addition to that, our service territories are doing very well. This is a good moment in the Midwest. Thank you very much for your time. Now I'm going to introduce Chris Shelton to talk about our new energy technologies.
Kristina. All right. Good morning, everyone. I am cognizant of the fact that I stand between you and the CFO at an investor meeting. We are gonna cover our new energy technologies business unit. I wanna start with a focus on, you know, the trends we've been seeing in our industry. There's been an increasing interest in corporate customers meeting their climate goals. We've heard about that today, and that is a very significant dynamic around energy and around electricity that we've been seeing. We also are seeing an increasing adoption of new technologies and scaling of technologies to meet that challenge. That creates an enormous opportunity for the companies that are willing and able to embrace that type of change.
As you can see, AES has been one of those companies and will continue to be, and we are accelerating that work, and so that's what I'm gonna share with you. This provides four main outcomes for our business. First, as we embrace that technology and that pace of change, we can fast track outcomes for our customers. Leo presented this already today, that when we embrace this type of technology, it allows us to make new types of solutions, and this will continue to differentiate us. That gives us a competitive edge that allows us to continue to grow and to be a leader in that growth as we've demonstrated over the last two years in the corporate and in the commercial industrial segment.
It also allows us to take our insights, that can be commercial or technical insights, and take those and turn them into new business platforms. We've also done this allows us to get paid for our insights beyond some of the core business models we might have, and we'll talk more about that. Lastly, being in this type of company that's driving this important change for society makes this a great place to work, and it allows us to this change and this challenging work allows us to grow the best team in the industry and to attract and retain the best talent as a result. Now putting this from a shareholder perspective, there are 3 primary value levers that are related to this growth.
First, and most importantly, you've heard about it today through the other three SBU presentations, that it's an uplift in the core business. It drives relative outperformance in our businesses, and you can see that showing up in the numbers. The second two on the slide here, two and three, or the next two are what comprise this new energy technologies SBU. The first is the leading tech platform businesses, and we have the example of Fluence, which we're gonna talk more about. Again, that creates portfolio value that is where we're getting paid for being a leader in this transition in different business models.
The third one is a way for us to grow new businesses that can be asset-based models, like our renewables business, and serve the same kind of clients in many cases, which we've also heard about today. These, because they're scaling into the sector and we're sort of the beginning of that scale and we'll see others come, these are gonna provide upside beyond our guidance window primarily, and we'll talk more about that. We're doing this just to show how these levers have been working over the past decade. We have been doing this type of change and delivering these three value levers to shareholders. We heard about the Green Blend & Extend. That's a set of technology insights and industry insights that allowed us to drive a very successful 5 gigawatt commercial strategy.
we built a energy storage platform, we'll talk more about this, we were able to IPO that platform. It got capital it's continuing to grow. It's valued at $3 billion today. The last one, which may not be fully recognized, but I think today you see it in the numbers, that Leo presented, we will be 80% renewables by 2027, that expectation comes from work that we began and were determined to do starting in 2015. We started that work from an innovation mindset with a commitment to build a completely new infrastructure growth vehicle inside of AES. I wanna show this. It's a bit complicated, you can see it in the download.
In the center, you see the different types of innovation activities we have ongoing. We wanted to present this to show how they cut across the SBUs. These result in two main advantages for the company. On the upper left, you see that we have improved customer satisfaction, which Leo talked about, and that competitive edge that should drive a belief in the continued success and growth of AES on a relative basis. Then on the lower right-hand side, you can see higher success rate and improved value for the innovations that we create. The way we deliver that is through the tech platform businesses and new high growth green business expectations for the company. Now, you may be asking: What's the scope of all of this work?
We're very focused on this. We didn't become the leader in commercial industrial renewables without this focus. We put our best people on the best opportunities. We have a narrow set that we stay focused on. That is represented here by the four customer segments which Ricardo introduced, as well as the five solution areas that we have at the bottom. To give a little more color on how we do that, we are very focused on building and accumulating advantage over time in these five areas that we showed here: the greener capacity, smart grid, carbon-free electricity, digital solutions, and electrification. Today, I'm gonna talk about two of these, the bookends, the greener capacity, which is energy storage as the technology area is related to, and electrification, which hydrogen is an enabler for. First, let's talk about storage.
Some of you may know, AES actually originated the modern energy storage category when we first built a lithium-ion battery system for the grid. We designed it around 2007, and by 2009, we actually had it in commercial operation. That's the photo here on the left. That's the very first commercial lithium-ion battery project in the world. When we did this in the U.S., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission actually recognized that it was the very first time that a battery had been recognized as a generator. Fast-forward from that time to now, you could see in Leo's presentation, a very significant portion of our growth in renewables is storage, and that's in our core business models, that develop, own, operate asset model. We've been able to grow quite well in that business.
If you look on the right, we're seeing an enormous demand for storage, which AES actually had anticipated. That 34% of the U.S. interconnection queue being storage is 2x wind now. This is pretty remarkable. It's second only to solar. That is a lot, and we think a lot of this may fall out of the queue like has happened in the past. There's about a 15% success rate on interconnection queues in the U.S. If we apply that to this 34%, there would be an expectation of 65 GW of storage being online by 2025 in the U.S. across all the participants. It's an enormous growth potential for storage. We anticipated that, and as I said, we wanna be paid and create value for our insights and for our leadership.
We created a business called Fluence. We did that in partnership with Siemens. This business has is seeing some of this growth now with 35%-40% growth expectation. These are, this is from their last quarter materials, just to be clear. They also have committed to be EBITDA positive in 2024. They have a strong demand with a $10 billion pipeline, which is 4 times their backlog. This is a platform that we built, we continue to own a portion of, and it's sitting in this incredible market opportunity. I wanna highlight another aspect of Fluence and how AES actually works in synergy with Fluence on some opportunities. We think at AES, one of Fluence's competitive edges is they're focused on application of the technology to the sector.
Many other players focus on different aspects of the problem of energy storage. Fluence has always led with the application. They recently launched this Fluence Ultrastack, which is a transmission application. It's the first time different grids around the world are accepting storage as an alternative to transmission. What it's doing is it's unlocking transmission corridors that have been congested. One of those is between the central region of Chile and the northern part of Chile. AES is actually developing a 500 megawatt project using this technology to help unlock that transmission line in Chile. We're excited about the potential to bring this to the U.S. to solve some of the grid bottlenecks here in the U.S. Let's move on to hydrogen.
Looking at the overall landscape for hydrogen, on the left you can see the global CO2 emissions by sector. On the green there, you can see electricity and heat. This is what we traditionally think of as the energy-related emissions. Most of what we're talking about today is decarbonizing that part of the economy. By decarbonizing electricity. Hydrogen creates the opportunity to decarbonize transport and industry, which now represent more emissions than the electric system and the heat system. On the right, you can see opportunities that we've identified from this is from third-party analysis, where we think the emerging markets will be for hydrogen and the first that we'll want to decarbonize.
Within that emerging at the top, that 81 million tons per year, we think there will be like an RE100 that came and led the renewables adoption. There will be some subsegment of that, of commercial industrial clients that will want to come first with the green hydrogen. This could be an enormous market. What does this look like for us as a business? This is a view of the vision of our hydrogen business that's inside our new energy technologies SBU, and we're focused on truly differentiating this platform. We're bringing all of our capabilities in from our renewables business, and we're leveraging the development, engineering, and innovation teams to truly build this differentiated position. I also wanna call out again, this is a contracted clean asset business, just like the renewables business.
That's the approach that we're taking. It'll deliver green fuels, which could be meaningful for some of our energy infrastructure transitions and will allow us to help decarbonize our customers further. It could result in 1,000 GW of additional demand for renewables. On the right-hand side in the purple, you'll see the team's vision. We've put in here a construct of this 1,200 metric tons per day vision of capacity being online. If we were to meet that vision, it would require about $20 billion of capital, of which we would expect AES to be about $1 billion of that. Let's drill into what that looks like at a project level. We already heard about this today. We're partnered with Air Products. They're a equity partner in this business with us and a hydrogen offtaker.
It's a $4 billion capital project. We expect $150 million to $200 million of that to be AES equity. We expect the same return profile as our renewables business. On the right-hand side, we're talking about 1.4 GW of wind and solar capacity, 200 metric tons per day of hydrogen production. At the bottom, I want to highlight that the renewables are designed, so it's not just any old 1.4 GW, it's actually the same type of portfolio development that we do for data centers we did for the electrolyzer, and we're developing the capability to time match and dispatch these together, there's ongoing innovation here, to deliver that hourly matching.
That results in a very high expectation that we will receive the full $3 per kilo, per kilogram incentive for this project, where there are other projects around the country where people are wondering about what their carbon intensity is gonna come in at. Here we know quite certainly that it's gonna be well within the target for the $3 per kilogram. What does this look like overall? There are 3 main markets that our hydrogen team is developing in. The U.S. is exciting because there's a lot of resident demand in the U.S. It's supported by the IRA, and we have global export opportunities. Chile has a great domestic mining opportunity, which we already have good relationships in that market, and an Asian market export opportunity. Brazil is a great market for European export.
On the right-hand side, we've already said earlier we have 800 metric tons per day in active development. This is what we call, we call our pipeline. But the team has identified a broader opportunity set in these markets of 3,200 metric tons per day. We put a little cheat sheet at the bottom. 100 metric tons per day is roughly $2 billion in capital need, inclusive of the hydrogen plant and the renewables. We wanted to round out with showing a few other of the key initiatives we're working on. These follow the three, the one, two, three that I've been showing throughout the presentation. Uplight in the core, new tech business platforms, potentially, and new green business opportunities that are more in the asset model.
Across the top, just to hit a few of them, Atlas, it's a solar construction robotics system, uses artificial intelligence computer vision to see the modules and to place them and fully secure them down the line of a single-axis tracker. Our early validation work here is showing this can be half the cost and half the time. Uplight is a cloud-based system that focuses on customer engagement and the deployment of distributed energy resources and the orchestration of those. They have 80 customers, utility customers in the U.S. Behind those 80 utility customers are 75% of households and businesses in the United States. They have the ability to orchestrate those assets and create virtual power plant type services that can allow the customer side of the equation to be part of integrating the renewables onto the system overall.
Lastly, we talked, Juan Ignacio spoke about the potential for repurposing our infrastructure. We see many different ways that this could happen with proven technologies that we can validate and bring into that existing infrastructure position. Pulling it all back together to the value levers for shareholders and customers. Again, that uplift in the core. We think we will continue to see relative outperformance of this part of our business. This is enabled by the tech innovation that you've been seeing. For the second piece, our current portfolio here is valued at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in the recent year. That you can think of that as it's an 8 times the equity we've invested. We think there's a great value yield to the cash going into this activity.
That's kind of proving that we're getting paid for our insights as we lead. Then we've modeled here just the vision that we talked about earlier of that 1,200 tons per day vision. On an ownership adjusted basis, with our expectations around that business line, that could be $500 million in 2030 EBITDA with tax attributes, and that's AES's share of that business. I wanna end with one last slide. Some of you may know that the Edison Electric Institute, which is kind of the utility group in the U.S. of utility companies, has an award. They hand out two awards every year for innovation in the electric sector. You know, it's Edison, and you actually get this bronze bust of Edison every time you win this award.
Our team has won seven of these in the last 15 years, which is an unprecedented number of any company as far as we know. I highlight that here just to reemphasize, you know, that our team is really proud of this recognition, and it is a long-standing set of innovation activities that are recognized by our peers in the industry. It really highlights what I think is an important part of how AES is creating value in the energy transition. It's that our company has, I think, the most unique combination of industry knowledge, which is really critical in such an important infrastructure business, and entrepreneurship, and willingness to drive the new change. It's that combination that we think will allow us to continue to create the most value in the energy transition. With that, I will turn it over to Steve Coughlin.
Okay, here it is. Hopefully I can keep you guys engaged with the financial outlook for the company. This kind of builds upon everything that you've seen. We have put together a five year plan, which I think brings together a lot of these concepts, the growth in the renewables and the utilities, and it walks through some of the offset we have as we complete the exit of coal. Overall, I think it's an extremely compelling story. Let me first start by talking about how I see as CFO of AES, kind of the big picture, the big story, I thought I'd think about the future of the company.
We have this extremely fast-growing renewables platform, and we're earning very attractive returns in these businesses, as Leo discussed in how we do that. What's great about our renewables business is we largely know the CapEx of these businesses up front, and there's very minimal OpEx on an ongoing basis, and of course, no variable fuel costs. Once you know the return, you sign your PPA, you feel very confident about what the financial outlook for these projects and ultimately the business that stems from them becomes. It's also a business contracting, as we've emphasized, under long-term contracts. Our average PPA life is 20 years. These are U.S. dollar denominated contracts, and they're contracts being done with large scale corporates, investment grade companies, whether they're in the U.S. or outside the U.S.
Secondly, and also I'd say there, you've seen this, our capacity, given this machine that we have now running, is going to triple over the next five years, going from 15 GW up to that 40-45 gigawatt level. I think relative to our base, we're the fastest growing renewables leader in the market. Secondly, utilities. We've heard from Kristina, the fantastic utilities plan here. We have an investment plan for our U.S. utilities driving high teens Adjusted PTC growth, pre-tax contribution growth, through the five year period. This is a function of a few things. It's a function of we're catching up on earnings on investment that's already deployed. We have a pending rates to put in place in Ohio that's supporting that.
We have the current rate base that has a tremendous amount of headroom for growth, given that we're the lowest rates, residential rates in Indiana and Ohio, and the lowest rates across all customer classes in Indiana. Frankly, we've been under-investing in Ohio as we've been paying down debt. Now with the ESP4, we're pivoting to a very high growth period, and there's a lot of new investment as Kristina walked through in our Dayton territory and even in Indiana as well. These regulatory frameworks that we have are also yielding very fast recovery on the new investments. As we put money in, we're gonna very quickly see earnings and cash coming out of those businesses as we put that capital to work, which is fantastic.
The other thing, here, you've seen some of this, particularly with Juan Ignacio and Chris, AES has been and will continue to be a diversified portfolio, there's a lot of those benefits come from that diversification. We have some unique advantages here in that we are, while we're operating in just a few geographies, really growing now, we're serving some very large corporate customers across multiple geographies. We are contracting with Microsoft. We have in Chile, in Brazil, and of course, in the U.S. We have mining customers that we are long-term customers in Chile who are now have mining operations in the southwest of the U.S. looking for us to bring this Green Blend offering to them in the U.S.
These are U.S. dollar businesses, investment grade companies, exporters. They have a lot of runway with these operations, both in the energy supply, the electric supply, as well as potentially green hydrogen opportunities. We have this broad technological expertise to share across, you know, to combine technologies to share these tailored solutions with these customers. We have this gas and LNG infrastructure, which as you all saw, provided significant upside next year. It's really quite asymmetric. We have long-term Henry Hub based contracts. We can use that fuel in our facilities, or we have the optionality if the spreads make sense between international and Henry Hub to divert that fuel to other markets and, of course, profit from that spread.
There's a lot of optionality and a lot of cash, and earnings coming from these businesses that we can redeploy and support our growth. Then finally, this intended coal exit really is advancing the transformation of the AES portfolio. We're becoming more and more less carbon exposed, more and more long-term contracts and utilities. So we have a significant amount of investors that have been on the sideline. They love all of what the AES is of today and what we're growing to, but they have some strict thresholds on where coal needs to be to come in. I've personally talked to many of these folks, many of them in Europe.
As we bring this percentage down, I see them being able to act on that excitement and start to come in this, in this timeframe over the next two-three years and create demand for the stock lifting it up. We also see this as a source of capital. I think you've all heard hopefully about the Warrior Run deal, $357 million. That's the nominal value of the stream. We'll monetize that this year. As it's monetized, it won't be that full amount of value, but it is a significant amount of cash that we're able to fund the growth of the renewables and the utilities with. Finally, these assets have repurposing potential.
There's a lot of option value in this interconnected, you know, zoned, for energy infrastructure, well-sited, often in load centers, coal portfolios that can be repowered with other technologies as we talked about. I see this as, yes, this piece of the business is shrinking, creates a platform for new growth beyond the 2025 period. What do the numbers start to look like here? You've seen some of these, I'll go in a little more detail than what you have seen. The target returns are both on a postmortem basis as we go back on a regular basis to look at what we're actually yielding postmortem once we've constructed our projects, take that learning and refine our modeling and our assumptions going forward.
We are getting these 10%-13% returns in the U.S. We intend to continue to get them as we see our cost of energy in our portfolio of pipeline projects being very competitive. Our ability, as Leo walked through, to efficiently finance these, to attract the tax equity at very attractive rates, and to structure the commercial opportunities in a unique way that these are de-commoditized. What's also fantastic is that our non-U.S. renewables actually have a very similar risk profile. These are, again, long-term contracted PPAs in U.S. dollars with investment grade off-takers, often exporters from some of these markets, really focused on Chile, Brazil, a little bit down the road, Mexico.
We have a pipeline on warm in Mexico that, you know, there's a neighborhood premium factor to these. I think for us, we see this as a very attractive structure that really eliminates that neighborhood risk, and we still can get this premium. Looking at our utilities, while at the utility level, it's a 10% ROE, regulated ROE, we don't when we look at it that way, we don't look at it with the utility holdco leverage, which above the utility, we have holdcos where there is debt at that level. If you factor that in, we're actually getting mid-teens returns in the utilities on our investments, 13%-15%.
Finally, in this category here of what we are focused on with the LNG infrastructure and all the optionality that we've had, and in the gas business, particularly in Southland, we've seen extremely attractive returns. Right here, it just says greater than 15%, 'cause in some cases it's many times greater than it. Because of the flexibility that we anticipated would be valuable, and in fact, that became very true, that that flexibility is very valuable, particularly in what you saw last year with the LNG spreads, particularly in Southland, as we continue to see an important role for energy security for those Southland legacy assets. Andrés covered this, you know, I'll just highlight for clarity. We are reaffirming the 7%-9% growth rate through 2025.
There was some, I think, noise about what's gonna happen after 2025. In fact, you know, and we know that noise. The truth is the earnings power of the company does continue. We do continue to grow earnings. We are extending our earnings at a 6% to 8% growth rate off the 2023 base through 2027. We'll talk about, you know, what's driving that kind of above that. It does include the tax credits, of course, here.
The tax credits will grow year over year, and the rate of growth of those tax credits, while they may slow some as the tax credits relative to the base of renewables, is a little smaller over time, that's largely why that rate ticks down to that 6%-8% level. We'll talk a little bit more about that, and I think it'll be more obvious on this metric, which is Adjusted EBITDA. Why Adjusted EBITDA? It is, obviously, should be obvious, very closely related to the underlying business performance of our assets. I think also makes it easier to model and easier to run valuation metrics, on the business, particularly for these three reasons.
It excludes, for our presentation of this, the production tax credits and incentive investment tax credits for U.S. renewables. Therefore, it's not influenced by the timing of new construction projects coming online, and the lumpiness that potentially can ensue from whether that, those projects come on at the beginning of or the end of a quarter or the beginning of the next quarter, the end of a year, the beginning of the next year, which is not a value issue, but is a timing issue when you have an investment tax credit that does get recognized largely right up front. We wanted to clear that out so that it's clear what's with and without the credits.
Secondly, I kinda touched on this already, it's for analytical purposes, the EBITDAs of course very closely align with the underlying business performance and operating cash generation related to how we monetize the asset on a day-by-day basis, which is through these PPAs. That's where that metric will be driven from. Then, looking at how renewable portfolios are valued, and even as many of you in the room, I think, breaking apart AES into your own sums of the parts, EBITDA we've seen often used as a easier way to compare the different segments of the business and to compare businesses from to each other from different companies.
We think ultimately what we're doing is going to provide a more comprehensive and more clear package of information to help model AES and make it more comparable for easy for analysts to come in, both existing and new, to look at the company and help understand it. Let me look at the fundamental building blocks here or show you these. Again, these are long duration. This is looking at renewables kind of on a project-by-project basis. From an EBITDA perspective here, it's a stacking game. We have long duration assets, 20-year contract lives on average. They can be recontracted thereafter. We know the CapEx upfront at signing. We have the minimal ongoing OpEx, and we, for the most part, debt gets amortized during the PPA contract term.
What you're left with is at a project level, a very predictable and stable stream of EBITDA. And then this renewables machine we've been talking about is there a matter of stacking projects over and over, these predictable streams over and over and over. That's where this EBITDA metric, I think, has a lot of advantages in the clarity of the underlying predictability and stability of the EBITDA of the business. What does EBITDA look like? EBITDA for 2023, we're anticipating $2.6 billion-$2.9 billion for this year, and that's without tax attributes.
The tax attributes, as we spoke about, I think, on the Q4 call, we're estimating between $500 million to $560 million of tax attributes to be recognized in AES's earnings this year, getting to a total EBITDA with tax attributes, which some companies are reporting just a combined number of $3.1 billion-$3.46 billion. What's important here, is there's also been some noise about this. The tax attributes will continue to increase. We're at this 5 to 560 level. As we deploy the 25-30 GW over the next five years, these tax attributes hitting earnings will increase year-over-year, no doubt. It's just a function, straight function of how our capacity adds are coming online year-over-year increasing.
Now, the production tax credit does make sense where typically it has been for wind, where you have a higher capacity factor of wind generation. It's now an option for solar. In some of the highest insulation areas of the U.S., it may pencil out to yield the highest return. That's, of course, how we wanna make our investment decisions is what's gonna yield the highest return. There are some offsets, though, in that the investment tax credit actually gets larger premiums for the community energy adder and the domestic content adder. There's a bit of a offset there when you're looking at projects that could qualify for those. Those incentives are, in fact, richer on an investment tax credit basis.
We do expect the production tax credit mix on a proportional share to increase, but that doesn't mean that the total value of the tax attributes won't increase year-over-year. That's important to note. Where is Adjusted EBITDA going to go from here? We anticipate a 3%-5% annualized growth rate through 2027 on Adjusted EBITDA. That's the total of these bars. What's important for AES, given that we're a portfolio that is still transitioning out of coal, becoming a much more attractive risk profile, and I think one more attractive to bring in new investors, we have a story of really three different trajectories here on the right-hand side. We have a renewables business today growing at 19%-21%, approximately 20%.
We have a utilities business today growing at approximately 13%. However, we have an energy infrastructure business that during this coal phase out is shrinking about 16% annually. That's intentional, of course, because of our strategy to decarbonize. When you go back to the left, we kinda did a pro forma here, just looking at the dark blue on the left. If you exclude the energy infrastructure and really focus on where AES's growth is coming from, where our core business is, the AES of today and the future already at this point is growing at 17%-20%. That's the 23-27 renewables, utilities, new energy technologies without that burden of the coal exit to kinda help color in what this really looks like.
It's already a high growth company, but a company that's accomplishing a significant transformation with the coal exit during this timeframe. You might ask, and I will answer, what does this look like after 2025? It looks very, very, very good. 2026 to 2027, we expect a EBITDA growth rate of 12%-15%, and I fully expect that that level of double-digit growth will continue beyond this timeframe as well. This is a portfolio now, relieved from the dilution from the coal exits and really focusing only on that renewables and utilities growth, and then perhaps even turning into some growth in the energy infrastructure where we're seeing opportunities to repurpose these assets for cleaner technologies.
What that means is by the end of 2027, with all this growth, about 80% of our EBITDA in 2027 will come from this continuing high growth renewables and utilities SBUs. Okay. To give even more detail, I just wanna walk you through. Now, this is driver-based, not so much SBU-based. Starting with the 2023 Adjusted EBITDA on the left, this is without tax credits, our new renewables will contribute through over the next five years over $1 billion, $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion of Adjusted EBITDA from the 25-30 GW coming online. The utility growth plan will contribute $400 billion-$450 billion over this time frame. A significant amount of growth from where the company is focused.
We are, through this remaining coal transformation, we are offsetting, or we have to offset this $725 million to $775 million of EBITDA that will go away as a result of the coal sales and retirements that still will occur in this, in this time frame. Secondly, on the offsets, we have the renewables recycling program, where this isn't so much this is more of a temporary offset as we recycle capital out of renewables. We use them to fund new renewables, but there's some time differential in when that capital comes out and then gets redeployed that would get reflected in the future years beyond this time frame.
additionally, in that last bucket of $325-$375, we have included the Southland extension of the legacy units through 2026, as is currently contracted, which we recently announced, but not a further extension beyond 2027, which I am very optimistic about and I think brings more upside to this overall 3%-5% growth rate than what's here. As we advance in time, there's a very possible that we increase the outlook based on the Southland legacy, further extension possibility. Okay. I'll pivot to parent free cash flow. As a reminder, the parent free cash flow is the a measure of our cash available for investment at the AES parent level. This is a function of the distributions coming up from all of our subsidiary businesses.
then take out the overhead at the AES parent for running the portfolio. We take out the parent interest, the cost of the debt at the parent level, and we take out any U.S. cash taxes paid to get to this parent free cash flow metric. The growth here is of course influenced by the same factors, the growth in renewables, the utilities growth, and offset by the coal exits. And to some degree, we have a higher cost of debt built in given the current rate environment on our parent debt. Again, still 6%-8%.
This is actually a very attractive growth rate in that parent growth, and it results in a significant amount of the funding we need to execute on this plan coming from our organic internally generated cash. I'll turn to capital allocation, and how is this, all of this gonna get funded. First of all, when we're making decisions going forward, we're very focused on investing in our core markets, which are really the U.S., Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, primarily the U.S., and achieving the financial targets that we set out, those returns that we set out for those investments.
We are very focused on being very efficient with the financing structures, to ensure that we have the most competitive projects, and we garner the best return that we can from them, so that we are tapping tax equity, we're tapping those the construction warehouse that Leo described, and these master indenture programs that allow us to very quickly bring portfolios of renewables together and issue bonds out in the market under very similar terms as we have in the past. We are very focused on, of course, we're an investment-grade company today. That's not gonna change. That is a constraint for us, and it's also, of course, a significant opportunity to reduce our cost to capital over time.
When we model our debt, the credit metrics are a hard line where we are, but we also see an improving credit profile. I think it's very possible that our credit rating will improve over time as the share of the business that's in the U.S. that is long-term contracted and is not coming from coal grows significantly over this time period, as well as, of course, the utility growth rate. We'll continue to recycle capital from our renewables as we have a significant opportunity to improve our returns, that once we sell down the renewables, we bring in lower cost to capital pension fund type money. Often that boosts our returns, and that's been an important way in which we diversify our growth and accelerate our growth over more projects.
Lastly here, it was very important that we continue our dividend program and continue to expand the dividend at the 4%-6% rate annually. That is part of this plan and the guidance that you see. Just a brief look at the financing structures overall. You know, this is a program of investment of about $40 billion over the next five years. The large share of the funding is going to come from the non-recourse debt as it has in the past. The tax equity, of course, and these long-term relationships, these tax planning departments in these entities really love AES because they have a long-term visibility to plan and optimize their tax position. They look for us, and they reserve their tax capacity for AES 'cause it's very predictable.
Then on the equity side, we have development partners in the U.S., Alberta Investment Management, outside the U.S., partners like GIP, that are along with us in the development phase and are contributing up to a third to a half of the equity for the projects that we do. Overall, of the CapEx of that $40 billion, about 85%, probably even a little higher, is expected to go to the U.S. market of that $40 billion. Let's blow out the 15%-20% share that is AES. We anticipate a total capital deployment of about $12 billion-$12.5 billion over the five year period.
Continuing the dividend growth rate implies a $2.8 billion allocation to the shareholder dividend, and the remaining $9.5 billion to investments in our subsidiary businesses. Where is that going? Of course, I think you can probably expect this at this point, three-quarters to the 25-30 GW of new renewables, about 10%-15% to utilities, and about 5%-10% each to our LNG infrastructure growth and to our new technology portfolio of opportunities that we're continuing to develop. For the AES capital view, about 80% of the AES capital, that $9 billion-$9.5 billion, will be expected to go into the U.S. market. How are we gonna pay for all this?
As I said, the internally generated cash, that parent free cash flow, together with the recycling of capital from our existing asset base, is about two-thirds of what we need. I'm very pleased that we can fund two-thirds of this with our own businesses. That's the $5.4 billion and $5.5 billion. The asset sales, $2.7 billion-$3 billion. The asset sales are a function of the coal exits, the recycling of capital from renewables to the low cost of capital partners. Down the road, we have, you know, a portfolio of opportunities that can fill this in within this five year timeframe. There's then the debt issuance, which is sized to meet the credit objectives of the company, $2.2 billion-$2.4 billion.
Lastly here, equity issuances, which for the, in the five year timeframe, we expect $1.6 billion-$1.9 billion. Similar to what we've done over the past five years, we've raised equity at times, the equity units just a couple of years ago, to augment these sources of capital and to take advantage of the high growth opportunities that AES has in front of us, and because we position ourselves as such a strong leader in this space, and because our utilities are so well-positioned to grow. This is not this year. We've already shown our capital plan for this year. Certainly over the five year period, I do expect equity, common equity issuances to be part of the story.
Where this would be targeted would be towards the new growth that's been catalyzed by the IRA. For example, the project in Texas that we've discussed that was not previously anticipated to be on this accelerated timeframe. Once the IRA came in and we saw the $3 per kilogram incentive, the timeframe of that moved up. It'll be earmarked for projects and some of these large investments that will need to get started in construction and will come online after the 2025 period. It's exciting. I think we have, you know, plenty of time to manage when we need that. It'll be a function of, you know, the timing and amounts of the asset sales.
I think it speaks to the significant opportunities for growth and the plan for growth that we have. Lastly, I would just conclude with sort of a view on the value proposition. I think the growth rates speak for themselves. You know, I'm very pleased to demonstrate the company's earning power, not just through 25, but also post-25 continues. When you look at the company on an Adjusted EPS basis, even without tax credits, which some people put in, we're showing it both ways, but the Adjusted EBITDA is a fantastic story on how fast that's growing when you look at the core businesses and you look at the without coal. If you look at the portfolio today and how attractive it is today and how even more attractive it's becoming.
Long-term contractor renewables, U.S. utility investments with a high amount of rate-based growth, very high quality returns from these businesses, improving credit profile. Then about 80% of the equity being allocated to the U.S. gives you a sense of, you know, how to think about where the AES map of the future will be. We're very focused on a limited set of markets outside the U.S. where we have U.S. dollar businesses and investment-grade companies that will long-term contract with us. There's a massive amount of capital out there that we have deep relationships with to fund all of this investment and to do so with a competitive advantage. I have the utmost confidence in the numbers that you're seeing today and expect tremendous success from the company on this plan. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve. Well, what I'd like to do is have some quick summing up before we get to the Q&A and then lunch. First, all the pictures you've seen are actual photos. We use no stock photos, so you can see the impressive assets that we have. I think what you've seen today really is the depth of our management team, our depth of technical knowledge, the depth of opportunities that we have. I really believe that AES is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this energy transition. I also think that if you think over the last roughly five years, we have had the most profound transformation of any company in our sector.
If you think where we were, where we've gone, we're very well positioned to go to that next step. We're looking out five years. I think there's a lot of potential, as Steve was saying, for upsides in terms of using our existing assets, in terms of developing markets, for example, such as green hydrogen. We think our forecasts are really a good base, and we have to look at how these markets develop. We have the technical expertise, and we have the management team to take advantage of it. I also wanna just touch on some numbers in case you missed them over the last two hours. I think, one, we're gonna grow renewables, our renewables capacity by a factor of three. We're gonna have a 10% CAGR growth in our utility, US utility rate base.
We're going to have a 6%-8% growth in our Adjusted EPS and a 17% annual growth in our renewables and utilities Adjusted EBITDA. That is without tax attributes. If you include tax attributes, it's growing even faster. Taking those numbers and thinking about today's current valuation for AES, we think we're undervalued relative to our peers. You know, there's so many ways to slice and dice it, but we think no matter how you do it, we're gonna be undervalued. First, we have the largest renewables backlog relative to the renewables peers. What does this mean? This means we have signed PPAs. I think we have the strictest definition of what backlog is. Signed PPAs that we must construct and bring online.
If you think about the rate-based growth in our utilities, it's among the highest, if not the highest, relative to our peers. Here we're showing it, you know, sort of enterprise value divided by EBITDA. We're at 10. You know, be much more appropriate to do it by the different business segments, and I think you'll come to the same conclusion. And also, if you do it a P/E multiple of around 13. We think that no matter how you slice and dice it, based on the forecast that we're giving, understanding the transformation that's happening to the sector and understanding our competitive advantages, we think we're undervalued.
Our mission is accelerating the future of energy together, and that means working with all our partners, our shareholders, our clients, and our teams. We all feel very good about the future here at AES. With that, I would like to bring on, they're gonna bring on some chairs, so that we can sit here and you can ask the questions, and I'll be identifying you. They'll be passing around mics. Okay. Let's get everybody up. Okay, I see that, Julien had his hand up. Maybe it was accidental. I don't know.
No, no. Chris is in blocking position.
Hey. Good morning. Congratulations on getting here. And, thank you guys for the time. Julien Dumoulin-Smith, Bank of America. Listen, at the, at the, at the top here, you guys have a lot of asset turnover and churn here. Can you talk a little bit about what's baked into those assumptions, right? You had a $3 billion asset sale, you've got this equity. Can you talk about maybe the scenarios for where you could really reduce that total equity number, given the quantum of different assets that you have access to? And also, if you could clarify, how much is renewables sell downs as a function of that all? 'Cause that's also in the mix, I think you include.
You want me to take this?
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, the $2.7 billion-$3 billion is sized based on an opportunity that's even larger than that. I think there's a range of outcomes there. I think that what we presented is a reasonable expectation, based on what we've already announced. You know, things like the Warrior Run deal, that's starting to go to this year, that gets into that number. We've got the continuing recycling of the portfolios of renewable assets. If you look at the renewable, I don't have an exact number off the top of my head, but if you look at, for the most part, the U.S. projects, once they're online, we sell our position down to, like, 51% in tranches, 'cause that definitely supports our returns. We de-risk these.
If we look at modeling this going forward, I would assume within one-two years after the projects come online, our position gets sold down to that 51% level. That's, you know, between those couple of things, it's at least half that number. Then the remainder comes from the other, you know, sets of assets that we have in the portfolio. Certainly, Andrés has talked about for our technology businesses, you know, we see a lot of value upside in based on where they're valued today and the plans that they have and the track record that they have recently established, for example, in Fluence.
We think that's still significantly undervalued, but the, you know, continuing quarter-over-quarter improvements that we're seeing, we think that will start to get baked in and that there's a lot of value upside there. We're not certainly not a seller of Fluence today, but as Andrés has said, we're also not indefinitely gonna hold the share holdings that we have of that today. Over the five-year period, it's possible that, you know, we monetize some portion of these technology assets that at the point we reach a valuation we think is more appropriate and we don't see as much needed close collaboration on some of the new things like the grid booster that we talked about today. That is contemplated there, but it's not based on any one business being sold.
It's based on a range of outcomes of selling portions and, you know, the timing will depend on how fast the growth or how fast we need that capital for some of the growth that we need to fund in construction that comes online after 2025.
If I could clarify that last response, it sounds like the priority is to sell assets, and if you can sell those assets, then perhaps you eat into that equity number again, pending value.
Yeah. Like I said, I think equity is, should be expected, as, again, certainly not this year. With the IRA, you know, there's catalyzed a lot of increase in demand, I think with the green hydrogen segment, you know, as Chris presented, we have 800 metric tons of pipeline, some of these do need to start construction, you know, in the next two-three years. I think that's what's been a large part of what's been added versus the plan that we discussed a year ago, is this additional need for equity to support this whole new customer segment.
Related question, maybe talking about upside, but it also could offset some of the equity. I mean, the IRA has these other elements you alluded to, right? Energy communities, domestic contents.
Sure.
You suggest in your remarks that maybe some of it was, but maybe not fully included. I mean, how much latitude and how much dry powder does that, especially when it comes to the balance sheet? Maybe you could talk about the earnings element, but also the balance sheet element in reducing equity potentially as well. Maybe clarify what's reflected in the base too.
From the growth funding, you know, the investment grade is, the level of debt there, I think is fair to say that's not gonna move around too much. The timing may move around, but, you know, hitting the investment grade credit metric targets that we need, that's a non-starter. That's where we are. I think the other things that could happen, you know, let's see how, you know, some of this upside optionality we have in terms of, you know, the LNG business. We had, you know, a significant arbitrage opportunity last year. If we see that arbitrage come again, that offsets new capital need, 'cause that was, you know, $250 million+ last year. If we see Southland extended again, there's more capital.
Actually there's, you know, there's really upside even in this contract that we've done with Southland recently that is valued above the level even that we expected, so there's some upside already in there. We also have upside, you know, with the Southland the new-CCGTs. We have a capacity payment fixed, but we also have the option annually to choose whether to take on the energy margin or not. There's potential upside from there that's not baked in. Those types of things could offset the capital need. You know, overall, we're so well-positioned for growth that I would still expect the equity to be part of the plan for the five year period.
All right, cool. I'll leave it there. Thank you.
Oh, over here.
Thanks, guys. Thanks for the time today. Durgesh Chopra with Evercore ISI. Maybe just could you comment on percentage of earnings from the US? There's a lot of moving pieces. There's asset sales. You're getting out of coal, and then there's the hydrogen opportunity. As of this year, 2023, I believe 50% of the earnings are coming from the US, but just how you're thinking about that broadly through the course of the plan.
Well, we're currently at about half. Obviously, when you're investing 80% of, in the US, this is going to grow. I don't have it off the top of my head. We can get back to you. I don't know, Steve, do you have it?
It's about 50% this year on EPS basis is from the U.S., you know, that will continue to grow. You know, the EPS, of course, includes the tax credits that we don't have in the EBITDA. That, that's that shifts the balance of the EPS more towards the U.S. even more so than the EBITDA at this point. You know, it will get up to 60%-65% and beyond in this timeframe.
Got it. Just quick follow-up, the hydrogen opportunities that you see, are those predominantly U.S.-based, or could they be outside of the U.S.?
They are, I'd put it this way. The most immediate one is the project in Texas with Air Products. We're also involved in some of the hydrogen hubs of the Department of Energy. In Chile, we have a project which is ongoing, which would be to sell to our mining customers that we're selling renewable energy and capacity to start greening their heavy equipment. Sort of longer term, I'd say it's in Brazil, really to export to the European market. All of them would be dollar-based businesses with creditworthy off-takers. You know, I would say that it's, if you think of it, you know, 3 out of 5 are in the US, and the most immediate project is in the US. Oh, sorry. Oh.
There's somebody there.
Oh. Bridge over here.
Thanks. You talk about the undervaluation of AES. The one thing that seems to stand out is the valuation of the utilities, which historically it's funny to say this, but, you know, if you believe you've got double-digit earnings growth going forward, and great capital opportunities, you have not only opportunities for consolidation within the industry, but if the market doesn't recognize the valuation of AES in toto, is the utility business either freestanding as a spinoff or in a sale, would that be something that you might consider? Thanks.
Look, right now, as we were saying, we think the, we have a portfolio of assets. Utilities are important to our investment grade rating. We think it contributes to our growth story, not only within themselves, but helping us to, I would say, have insights into the market that help our renewables business growth. Look, we're always open to look at how to maximize shareholder value. You know, nothing is closed. I do think that, you know, today we're in a unique position where we have these, really a tremendous turnaround story of these utilities, which, you know, I can't really view stories like this. It, we're very excited about where we're going. You know, of course, we always have to look at all possibilities.
You know, the reality is that utilities are a key component underpinning our investment grade.
Over here.
Hi, I'm Ryan Levine, Citi. What's the magnitude of the EBITDA and free cash flow growth associated with the LNG business in the context of nearly doubling volumes? Are these assets vis-a-vis core to the business longer term?
You want to take this, Steve?
The energy infrastructure has both the coal and the gas in it. The gas EBITDA is growing as we brought online the second tank in the DR. We have, you know, the Southland assets growing. I don't have The IR team can get back to you on the specific rate relative to the gas. It is offsetting that $700 million from coal, there is a positive growth in the gas contribution. I would caution it, you know, last year was a outstanding year for gas given the significant arbitrage opportunity. Not necessarily relative to last year, certainly for this year, going forward, the gas business is a growth business. I don't know if I got the second part. Is that business core to your outlook longer term?
I would say yes. I mean, look, I think, you know, we have the expansion plans that we're continuing to execute. I think we have still unutilized capacity from when we bring all the tanks online or the third tank. We have some uncontracted capacity. You know, these Southland assets I think will be valuable for some time. Is it a place where we're building a lot, like new CCGTs beyond what we're doing today? Not necessarily, but for the potential development opportunity in Vietnam,
where we have been a trusted partner to the government, we're bringing them off of coal, supporting the development to go onto gas. You know, we are actively developing that today with the expectation that that ultimately becomes a renewables market but the gas is what they need right now. That's still, you know, not sufficiently mature to say that that's gonna be, you know, the numbers at this point and not in this time horizon. But it is a potential growth.
The way I would say it is that certainly, the LNG business is a growing business as we bring a second tank on in the Dominican Republic, as we connect more clients in Panama. Realize that gas is necessary to build more renewables in these markets and supply what are customers' needs. In addition to that, you have the fact that there's asymmetrical upside from the embedded options in terms that, you know, we can take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.
Part of that is, in some of these markets because we also own hydros, it's really our ability to switch between hydro and gas depending on the weather, depending on the opportunity. That is there. In longer term, there's also exists the possibility of repurposing these facilities. If you go out later and you go to something like e-methane or other things, those terminals, those storage tanks, or an adaptation of them could become very valuable.
Thanks. Then one financing question. What is the project-level debt assumption embedded in your renewable outlook through the forecast time period, given the $34 billion-$38 billion of noted capital investment in renewables, including green hydrogen?
Keep in mind though, the leverage level on renewables tends in the US is a little lower because we're getting the tax incentive. Typically we're seeing, you know, debt for the renewables in the 40%-45%. 40%-50%, I would say, of the total CapEx stack for funding for renewables. That's, that's what's modeled there, is at roughly that level. If you take the 25-30, you know, I would say 80%+ of that is US, and then that's the capital, the amount of debt that would go to the US. Outside the US, the leverage level is more like 70% on those projects.
There's a person there for a while with a hand up.
I think it's Angie.
Oh, sorry. Angie.
Okay. I actually have a number of questions, so maybe let's start with just a couple of them. As we're moving into the EV to EBITDA valuation of different segments, you know, we need some guidance on leverage per segment, and I saw disclosures in your first quarter slides. What surprised me is that the Energy Infrastructure segment has actually a lot of debt. As you are divesting or shutting down coal plants, is this debt getting repaid, or is it mostly associated with LNG facilities and Southland? Where does this debt actually sit?
The debt on the coal definitely gets repaid, Angie. We clear that out, and then our net proceeds from the coal sales are above that. The debt that you'd be seeing is largely related to the LNG infrastructure build-out, the new gas plant in Panama. Certainly we still have the, you know, the new Southland that came online just a few years ago, also has its early stage of amortizing its debt.
When you show us the proceeds from like, asset sales, that's net of debt?
Yes.
Okay.
All of our asset sale proceeds are net of any debt pay down for those assets.
Okay. Moving on to the EBITDA and the inclusion of the tax credits. Again, I know it's a debate, but in a sense, those tax credits get monetized and they offset or just are a part of the financing structure for the EBITDA, right?
Exactly.
If you were to account for them in the EBITDA, would be in a sense double counting.
Yeah. The EBITDA, I think what's important is that the tax credits are a significant source of funding, as you saw on that circle chart. You know, 30%-40% of the CapEx is funded by these tax credits. What we do is we finance that up front, and then we'll pay down.
Yeah
That financing when the cash comes in. The tax credits are earnings and cash. This is monetizable either through selling the credit to a partner, or to the extent you have a U.S. cash tax liability
Yeah
you can take it yourself and offset the cash tax paid. That would show up in our parent free cash flow. The other thing is there's an opportunity, as I think I was saying to you before, the tax credit gets claimed based on the fair value of the project. When we contribute the project into a tax equity partnership, there's a step up because that project's value has been de-risked. There's a step up somewhere, anywhere between 10%-20%, and that's the level of value upon which the credit gets claimed. That's an additional sort of layer of cash. It's not associated with any construction debt, we can upstream that cash and use that to fund new projects.
That's also cashed out, right? That's also a part of the financing structure then.
That's a part of, you know, cash that we would likely bring up to the parent.
Mm-hmm.
that's becomes fungible. Most, I mean, a large share of it, given the program, is going to go back into U.S. renewables.
Just one last one for now. The bridge between the EBITDA growth and the EPS growth, you mentioned that, you know, as the pie grows, the contribution of ITC is something that weighs on the EPS growth. I'm just wondering, in a sense, you are divesting assets which are, well, coal plants, which are highly depreciated and have low leverage, right? You're replacing them with undepreciated assets with a lot of leverage. In a sense, depreciation and interest expense are probably weighing more on the earnings growth than the ITC contributions being diminished by the size of the total pool.
The tax credit, especially with the ITC from an EPS standpoint, the tax credits are overwhelming, or they're more than offsetting the dilution from the coal sales, which is of course why the earnings have been growing quite well. Offsetting all that, you know, depreciation, et cetera. The tax credits or tax attributes in total, PTCs and ITCs, will continue to grow. What I've been pointing out is that there's not like a tax credit cliff or treadmill here because again, the IRA goes out 10 years just to even qualify and then several years beyond that to bring projects online. Also because the total volume of installations is increasing year over year, that even if the proportion that's production tax credits, you saw it's very small this year.
It's $10 million to $20 million of production tax credits. That will grow, 'cause that's a 10-year number, over time, the value of the ITCs will also grow, and the total picture will grow. It's not as if the ITCs are gonna shrink year-over-year. It's just that the proportion of PTCs will increase.
Okay, just one last one. About Uplight. Should we expect that you will float Uplight like Fluence?
Yeah, I'll take that. Really can't comment on that at this point. You know, we have Schneider Electric's our partner there, and it's a rapidly growing business. I think it's really establishing its niche. I can't comment on that. We had a questions over here. Yes.
Hi, thank you. Excuse me. Richard Sunderland, JP Morgan. Maybe to follow up more broadly on the Uplight question, looking across the new technology side, where do you see the most excitement over the next five years, the most opportunity? You know, where are you focused maybe even beyond that in terms of thinking about the long-term outlook you laid out with the 3X, you know, growth and the electrification opportunities broadly? You know, what are some down the road, items of focus as well?
What excites me very much, of course, there's green hydrogen, but it's also not just doing me-too projects. You know, really looking at how we can optimize the production of green hydrogen. let's say we're looking at those things today because we all know that the price and availability of electrolyzers, for example, is still quite high. There's a lot of improvement that could happen there. What also excites me is Atlas, you know, which is really a robotic building of solar farms. You can do it in half the time, half the cost.
The other one, of course, we have 5B, which includes the MAVERICK product, which is the prefab solar, which takes, you know, a little bit more than half the space, and can be built in a third of the time. You combine those 2, it'd be really quite dramatic. I think as you build out renewables, one of the things you'll see is the premium for space, for land that's close to interconnections, et cetera. All these things would give us opportunities to have a competitive advantage. That's the things that we're looking at is, you know, take our corporate clients. Maybe they want a solar facility near a plant or something adjacent. This would give us an opportunity to do things that other people can't do. I think that's very exciting.
The energy transformation, over even the next five years, but certainly over the next 10, there's a lot of new things that have to come online and be economical to achieve those goals. That's why we talk about it as a transition. I think those who are gonna be ahead of the curve are gonna have more opportunities. It's very important for us to be involved with those new opportunities. I think we've shown that we really have a secret sauce in terms that we can acquire or partner with small, very creative startups and not smother them as part of a big corporation, and really allow them to grow exponentially with our platform and our financing, and create a lot of value at the end as a standalone.
Equally, or perhaps even more important, is how much value they give us on our core assets. All those things I think are very exciting.
Very clear. Thank you. Then on the new SBUs, how much of renewables EBITDA is non-US, and then how much of utilities PTC would be El Salvador?
You wanna take.
Sure
The utilities and then you can take.
Sure. On the utilities side, El Salvador represents 20% on average over this period.
which will decrease in.
Is it decreasing over time?
Yeah.
Then on the EBITDA for the renewables, when you look at it on a, on a project basis, it's, you know, probably more 50%-ish. You know, the U.S. though has the overhead. The U.S. has all of the development overhead 'cause that's where we're spending the money. It's a little more international as a result of blending in that level. You know, by the time you get out to 2027, and the fact that 80% of the new capital is going into the U.S. market, you get to roughly that 75%-80% level in the, in the five year horizon on the U.S. mix of the, of the EBITDA there.
So.
On an earning, if I could also say on an earnings base, it's even higher US because the US tax credits, when you look at the EBITDA plus tax credits, then it's a significantly higher US because of all that tax credit value that's coming in.
Next.
Hi. Moses Sutton, Wellington Management. Thank you for this great presentation. As we think of reaching 40 to 45 GW online by year-end 2027, how should we think of the annual cadence in terms of CODs, and how does that relate to when I look at additional renewables that need to hit backlog of 14 to 19 GW? Would you need to sign those, let's say, within the next 18 to 24 months to, you know, be on track to bringing all these projects online, fully contracted, ready to go by 2027?
I don't know. Leo, do you wanna take that one?
Yeah. We're already targeting 3 GW, over 3 GW of CODs this year, right? I think we showed 14 GW in the next few years, that three should scale up over time. The timing for the signing of the PPAs is anywhere between, you know, 18 months to two years. The 2023 and a portion of the 2024 are signed, and then the future ones will depend on our continued pace of signing.
I think as Andrés mentioned in the call on Friday, we're very confident we can still sign the target that we have for this year, the 5 GW. That will allow for that 3 GW to be growing over time. I think the big opportunity here is that expansion of the market that I showed, right? If the market goes to the 70-80 GW, our potential here is to keep growing as the market grows. Keep growing the signings.
That's very helpful. Shifting to Fluence, I believe in your numbers you'd be assuming EBITDA breakeven by 2024 in line with Fluence's existing guidance. Are you assuming any incremental improvement in numbers, whether it's to the EBITDA, you know, earnings and so on, as you look out to 2027 specifically from Fluence?
Yeah. No, we do. Fluence, I can't get ahead of their guidance, they have their call coming up on Thursday. They have already announced the EBITDA breakeven. That's baked into our plans for 2024, and that's consistent with what I committed to, I think, a year ago on this overall AES Next portfolio, now Energy Technologies. You know, what we do though is we give ourselves some room in there for the earlier stage stuff, which, you know, is in its investment cycle.
It's more of a drag in the early stage. We see the mature components of that portfolio, Fluence, who's becoming more and more profitable in this plan, offsetting some of the earlier stage stuff, which is more of the drag in the near term. We don't count on any, you know, significant contribution, even though Fluence is becoming more and more profitable. I think that's a relatively conservative view.
Great. That's very helpful. Just one more from me. As we look out to eventually getting Treasury guidance on domestic content, to the degree that there's upside, specifically for solar and storage, that you can get the domestic content adder, would that be incremental to the tax attributes that you're including in the plan, or are you embedding some assumption there?
You wanna take that or.
Go for it.
Go ahead. Yeah. At this point, we have more visibility into the energy community rules, and Leo walked through the pipeline. We do have assumptions baked in around energy community upside for a portion of what's coming online. For domestic content, you know, that's We still need more clarity, and it's not I would say it's more upside at this point to the plan once we see what those rules are and when we can meet them. I think that's gonna be added benefit once we see those rules.
What I'd like to say there is that we're in very good shape here because we basically have all of our solar panels contracted through 2024. We will have them in country by the, you know, first semester of 2024. For 2025, we will have U.S.-made panels. You know, we've managed that transition very well. The domestic content is important, quite frankly, for the prices at which the panels will be manufactured in the U.S.
Yeah.
There's a question over here. You got a mic?
Steve.
Oh.
Here's a mic right here.
Intercepted. We'll get to Steve. I think he was asking first.
Oh, thank you. David Arcaro with Morgan Stanley. I was just wondering, you talk about the EBITDA accelerating when you look at the 2026-2027 timeframe. I was just wondering, does parent free cash flow also follow that same trajectory? As you look at. Maybe parent free cash flow or EPS even, do those also accelerate from the six to eight annual guidance range?
Yeah, nothing I would specifically give guidance on yet on that, but I think it's fair to say that the parent free cash flow will have a relationship to a EBITDA growth that, and that EBITDA growth is strong in the double digits, and I expect that to that level of growth to continue even beyond the planned horizon. I think linking those two more closely is appropriate, but I don't have a specific guidance on that to give.
Now going to Steve there.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. No, no worries. Just on that point, Andrés, you mentioned about the domestic content in the U.S. How are you When you say U.S. production, does that mean nothing from China, including no ownership? Or how are you dealing with the China issue?
Yeah.
when you say U.S. domestic content?
Well, you know, right now we're the panels that we're bringing into the States are coming from Southeast Asia. The, they are Chinese companies, you know, but they're also moving waiver, wafer manufacturing, you know, outside China. You know, who the winner is of the bid RFP that we've put out, you know, I can't get ahead of myself. You know, it will be among the most reputable, you know, solar manufacturers in the world, the ones who are competing. You know, it would comply with all the rules regarding what is qualifies as domestic content.
Okay. You will not y ou'll just be a buyer of the panels. You're not going to own any of the.
That's correct.
Yeah.
That's correct. You know, we've put out an RFP, and, you know, that gives the sort of anchor so that they can build a facility.
Okay. Then just on the tax attributes, I guess for Steve, just is there kind of a guidance for 2027 for tax attributes?
Yeah.
to fill the whole picture together?
I would say, the relationship last year, we brought online 1 gigawatt, and that was $230 million of tax attributes recognized last year. We're going up to the $500 million to $560 million this year with 2.1 GW. I think that relationship will hold for the next couple of years through 2025 roughly, Steve, 'cause for the backlog, we have locked in our tax credit election at this point. You know, so much of what's coming online between now and 2025 is from the backlog. Thereafter, I would see, you know, perhaps some softening of the relationship as the PTCs become a greater share, but there's still absolute growth there. And the good thing about the production tax credits is, you know, of course, it's a 10-year stream.
You know, it's less of the lumpiness overall. Again, the reason to choose that is because it's the best return on the project. That's ultimately what we wanna focus on is what's gonna yield the best return. I think the ITC will still be the larger share, and in particular because we see the adders for the energy community and the domestic content being more significant on the investment tax credit basis than they are on the production tax credit basis.
Okay.
That concludes our program today. Thank you everyone for joining. For those of you in the room, please feel free to go outside, grab lunch, and we'll be eating back in this room. Thank you everyone.