Good morning, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. We're so delighted to have a room full of all of you. Before I get started, however, I have to get a few things out of the way. First of all, I wanted to start with a safety moment. It's something that we do at the beginning of every week at Ameresco, and most of our construction teams do at the beginning of their days. Just a quick reminder for everyone, the exit is there. If we all need to exit, take a right out the door, go back down the steps. I'm also reminded that the most common workplace injury are slips, trips, and falls. As we're all coming up and down here today, and also if we need to exit the stairs, please be very careful.
Now, moving on to my next thing, I would like to take a moment to talk about forward-looking statements. Before we get started, I wanted to remind everybody that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements about our future expectations. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the safe harbor language on slide 2 of this presentation and to our SEC filings for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. In addition, we use non-GAAP measures in this presentation. You can find a definition of these measures in our Q1 earnings materials. Okay, all the hard stuff out of the way.
Now let's get to the really good stuff here. Again, we're very delighted to have you here today to Ameresco's first Investor Day in London. We did an Investor Day last year in New York City, and we very purposely chose to be here in London this year. We have so many exciting things happening in Europe, and we thought the best place for us to be was to be here with all of you in a place where we see exciting opportunities. We wanted to take a minute for you to not only be here with us, but for you to meet so many members of our team and so many members of our team that are specifically focused here in Europe. Also to take the time and meet some of our great partners that are here with us, and finally, have the great opportunity to meet one of our great customers that is here.
All of that is gonna be wrapped into the next 2.5 hours, and we look forward to sharing this with you. We will take breaks and ask questions and have opportunities for you all to ask questions. Please know that we would like this to be a very interactive session. As we get going here, again, I refer to our safe harbor language. Please know that this is something that's quite important to us. Agenda real fast, if I can just walk through this with you. George is gonna open us up with some welcoming remarks. We're gonna go right ahead into Britta's presentation on our European strategy and some of the policy here. We're gonna walk into our first panel, hosted by Josh Baribeau, where he will talk about E.U. merger and acquisition and some of our partnership success strategy.
I will then take you into the next panel session, where we're gonna dive a little bit more into what's happening here in the U.K. and some of the success that we've had. I'm very excited that we have Councillor Kye Dudd here to talk about the Bristol City Leap project. Doran will come up and walk through some of the financial updates that I think you're all eagerly awaiting. Finally, we'll ask George to come back up on stage with some closing comments before we kick off a nice Q&A session.
With that, these are all of the folks that are here joining us today. The top row is a mix of all of the corporate folks as well as some of the regional people. As you go down, we have more of our European team here. Also note we have Kye Dudd, as I mentioned before, and a partner here, Konstantinos from Sunel.
Now, George, everyone wants to hear from you, so come on up.
Thank you very much, Leila, and good morning, everyone. Of course, welcome to our first investor conference in Europe. It's very appropriate that we will do it in the U.K., in London, because this is our first step coming into the European market. We started with London and of course, you guys, we went through the Brexit exit, and that took some time for our company to evolve, but it was a great opportunity for us, and we feel very, very good where we are today. A few comments that I would like to make. As many of you know, we have become the first-class and the number one cleantech integrator. In the United States, we have the number one market share when it comes to the ESCO market.
As it turns out, in the UK right now, we are again created the number one ESCO as well. What we wanna do now, expand that footprint across Europe, because we think the opportunity is great in the European market right now because of the energy prices where they are, as well as people looking for more resiliency. What has happened in the marketplace, the distributed generation or renewable generation, it makes very good economic sense for the particular customer, as well as economic sense, as well as resiliency for those particular customers, especially the C&Is, the data centers, and so on. That's our mission. Here, we wanna become the number one brand in Europe. Now I will talk a little bit how we're gonna get there.
How we're gonna get there, basically, it's gonna be a similar strategy that we did in the United States. We will start basically doing some acquisitions, whether it's talent, people, or companies. If we're acquiring companies, we're gonna make sure they are accretive, and they are in a particular place that we want to establish a strong footprint. 'Cause in order to be successful in the European, you know, I come from Greece, and I understand the cultures and so on. Each and every country has a different culture, in order to be effective and serve that particular country, you gotta establish a local presence. In the acquisitions, though, we will be measured. Generally, they will be smaller, and we will grow them.
'Cause that's the value that we bring to the marketplace, and that's how you create value overall in the company. We'll have organic growth as well as the acquisitions. Joint ventures, they have helped us a lot. Konstantinos, we will talk about it later on in the discussion. We look at the partnerships that they will help us quite a bit. Then the other thing that we will do in the Europe, like we did in the United States, have broad and deep technical expertise. The one-stop shop that we have developed in the United States has helped us tremendously. Otherwise, the particular customer will go with the integrator. If they want solar, distributed solar, we can do it. They want a microgrid, we can do it.
They want a smart streetlights or whatever the case may be, energy efficiency, we cover the comprehensive all the measures otherwise associated with it. We will develop the project, design it, finance it, and the value proposition, we'll guarantee performance through that, and it works very, very well. We will try to rematch, do in Europe exactly the same thing that we did in the United States. It's proven. The other one, we will leverage Ameresco's proven execution track record. In the marketplace, every time that the federal government in the United States, they go out with their request for proposals, we always score number one on technical competence and project execution. At the end of the day, that's what the customers are buying. We are paranoid about customer satisfaction. You're as good--
In many of the projects, the RFPs, the request for proposals, the customers go out, it's a qualification. The qualification is how well did you do on the last job that you performed? If the customer is satisfied, then you will do very well in going down the road. One of the federal government agencies, in one of the largest projects that we won was Savannah River, a $200 million project some time ago. He retired, and in the start-up operations, he says, "George, would you like to know why we picked you?" I says, "Why?" He says, "Your customer satisfaction was unparalleled." He says, "How did you do it?" I says, "Well, I have to buy it." He says, "How you buy it?" I says, "Delivery. Always exceed their expectations." That has served us very, very well.
That's how we built the company, and we wanna do the same thing over here. We will leverage our track record. The other thing, I talked a little bit, the holistic approach. I talked to the people in Bristol City, and they are here today, and they will discuss it. One of the reasons why they picked us, there were 25 other companies that responded to the request for proposal. They picked us to decarbonize the city because we have the expertise on the solar, on the wind, on the geothermal, on the energy efficiency, the smart lights, smart cities, and so on. At the end of the day, when this deep carbonization evolution, we want to be the key player that helps the cities and towns, the communities, the customers to get there.
You know, when we established the company and we said our mission is to energize a sustainable world, you say, "Well," and that was way back when we started in 2000. Now the world has evolved around our strength. Back then, you know, some people will say, "Well, I will get you to decarbonize." Well, they used to get glassy eyes. Today, they want it. The other thing that has happened, not only they want it because of the climate change and so on, but the intersection of the cost, of the technologies, the costs have come down, and thereby it makes more economic sense to have distributed generation today than anything else. The best renewable resource is energy efficiency. People underestimate the potential of energy efficiency.
You know, 30% of what energy that we're using can be saved, it can be saved economically. What do I mean by economically? Less than seven-year payback. There's not that many investors that you'll find with less than seven-year payback. That's why it makes sense. You know, I was talking to the Greek government when the situation with Ukraine started, and the gas prices came up, and they said, "Well, how are we gonna survive this winter?" I said, "You underestimate the potential of how much energy will be saved by the people because they, they recognize that they have to do it." I said, "Don't be surprised that 5%-10% of the energy will be saved without doing anything." Actually, that's what happened, and Europe survived, and they're doing very well.
But on the other hand, though, people woke up and they say, "We gotta do something about it." That we are at the right place at the right time. You know, people when I started Ameresco back in 2000, and I told my staff, we had a meeting, that we wanna be number one in this space, some people, they thought we were dreaming. Sometimes what looks impossible, it becomes possible by persistence and execution and bringing together the right talent. You know, we are in the service business and so on, but at the end of the day, in order to execute very well, we got to have the right talent, the right people, and we got to motivate them.
Because the environment is so, and the young generation today, they are concerned about climate change, and we offer them the more technologies. If they say they want to go to the renewable natural gas, we do it. They want to go to the geothermal technologies, we can do it. They want to go to the smart cities, we give them more flexibility, and that gets us very well. We feel very comfortable where we are. We feel very comfortable with Europe. Basically, we're going to redo our story. What we did in the United States, acquiring the 20 companies that gave us a great footprint, we will do the same thing in here. On the other hand, though, we will be very measured in our approach, what companies we buy, what talent we bring aboard, and so on.
Now I will turn the forum over to Britta to go ahead and talk a little bit more about it. Britta, by the way, she took over U.K. some time ago, and she has done an excellent job. We went from a little engineering company to number one, right?
It's always really difficult to follow George. You know? I'm never that lucky. Really glad to see everybody here, thank you for taking time out of your day. I can move this forward. All right, let's talk just a little bit about where we are here. I love London. It's been my second home for a long time now, I'm very glad that we're here. Yes, George mentioned the fact that, you know, we all went through Brexit as well. Yes, okay, not technically part of the European Union, but still part of that whole family and opportunity.
When we started in the U.K., or at least in the United States, and decided that we wanted to sort of look outside of North America for potential expansion opportunities, we decided to start here. You know, you could sort of say, "Well, because we speak English here." I will say, I never thought I would have to learn how to speak English twice, because it's a different kind of English. But it was a great opportunity for us to start in a place that we're more familiar with. And we looked for two very small and really capable energy consultancy firms that had, as George mentioned, great talent, great customers, and a track record of really good execution.
We looked to build those entities so that they could provide the types of projects that we do provide in the United States, renewable energy assets, energy efficiency, as George was talking about, sort of as a bedrock, and operations and maintenance services. What happened in the course of doing that is we went from a very small footprint within the United Kingdom to one now that covers assets in Ireland, as well as projects probably in just about every corner of the United Kingdom. We're really proud of that. You know, there are projects across all market sectors, universities, hospitals, councils, schools. You know, it just sort of continues to build. They run the gamut of all of the types of services that we provide. Typical energy efficiencies. I mentioned wind power.
Solar, we're doing a lot of that now. That's starting to sort of morph into solar and battery energy storage here. You know, being able to bring advanced technologies to our projects in the U.K. is really fantastic. Then sort of the standard things like lighting and street lighting, you know. All of that leads to, as George was mentioning, a sort of a holistic approach to tackling problems. It allows us to start really thinking about doing things that are transformational for our customers, like decarbonization. You're gonna hear more from Kye on what we're just incredibly proud to be partnering with the city of Bristol to decarbonize their estate. That's just a monstrous step forward that others can replicate, and we can really, really move the needle, on climate goals, if we do that.
That's sort of where we were with the U.K., sort of that next natural progression, you know, into Greece, as George said. You know, he is originally from Greece, and so a soft spot in his heart for everything that's there. You know, it's also an excellent, an excellent location for us to do the kinds of projects that we really do well, renewable energy generation. Amazing natural resources there for doing renewable energy projects. We started with about 10 MW of wind on one of the islands, in the Ionian Sea. We're right now in the middle of working with our partner, Sunel, to build 100 MW of PV, literally on the side of a mountain, not on top or in a valley, but on the side of the mountain.
You know, that's allowed us to also sort of start to expand and build relationships with other developers to allow us to help build their PV portfolios in and around Greece and other countries. You know, that was, again, that sort of first foray out of the U.K. bubble. Where we are now is we've just recently made the acquisition of the firm Enerqos, you know, located in Milan. Also super excited to have them as part of the Ameresco family. They also come with an amazing group of customers, an incredible talent base that'll allow us to help them grow into an entity that also serves customers like we do in the United States.
All right. We're, you know, as we talk about sort of the European expansion, what does that really mean to us? You know, the strategy really has been to replicate what we've done in the United States, a proven strategy and execution of, you know, finding accretive acquisitions, people that can bring amazing talent, strong track records, and solid customer portfolios. Looking for opportunities where we can do that, where there are amazing resources, where there is, you know, underserved parts of Europe that need the help to take that step, that advanced technology step into the future and provide secure and reliable power.
You know, where we've gone already in the blue, you know, we're looking to sort of continue to expand out into other countries that you see here on the map. We'll do that in a very deliberate and careful manner, and a couple of different ways, right? We wanna do that through partnerships. We wanna do that through acquisitions. Then we also wanna do it where our customers that we develop long-standing relationships with take us to. There are many customers that have portfolios of opportunities all over the region, and if we can work together with them and become their trusted partner, it's very easy for us to support them as they also look to expand around the European Union.
Some of the drivers that we look at when we consider where we wanna go next in the European Union really is climate policy-driven and then also geopolitical issues happening in and around the continent right now that are providing great opportunities for us to offer our services to other countries and other customers. There are some really amazing climate-neutral actions happening in countries all around the European Union, and those are the kinds of things we really wanna look for. Many of the cities and towns that we've talked to have already declared climate emergencies. They need the help that we can provide so that they can figure out how they take that next step in their decarbonization journey. How do they get to net zero? Those are all things that we look for as well.
Then just, customers that are demanding sort of a very quick approach, provides us with a real opportunity as well. I think, you know, you can probably take a look back at the last decade, and lots of people have been talking and talking and talking about decarbonization plans and climate change and climate strategies. I think that probably for the first time in my career, we really see this trifecta of, you know, climate needs, real climate needs that are existential problems that we wanna help solve.
We also have a customer base that really has sat up now and taken notice and said, "Look, we need to do something, and we need to do something now." Together with our capabilities that we can help solve those problems with them, it's really an exciting time for us as a company. On the geopolitical side, I mean, can't look away from the fact that there are tensions all around the globe, and there are tensions here in Europe as well. Those provide us with some real opportunities. Not only do customers, but also governments want to figure out how do they manage their electricity supply, their energy supplies? How do they make it secure, reliable, renewable?
Those are all things that we look to do, and it provides us with an, you know, just an unbelievable sort of landscape where we can help move these countries forward and secure their energy supply. All right, just quickly wrapping up on this. Our approach, and George has already spoken to much of this. Really, we wanna take our global solution that we started in North America and is now moving here to the U.K. and the European Union. Together with our sort of, our bench strength, our technical capabilities, the really amazing talent that we have throughout the organization, as well as our strong financial backing, as a company allows us to really take some really big steps and help move the needle in different countries.
We're gonna really just focus on a couple of different things, right? Like the acquisitions that we wanna target, we wanna make sure that they're accretive, that they're smart, that they bring additional good talent to the organization. Our joint ventures and partnerships that you'll learn more about later on are really, really important to us and allows us together to be more strong as we approach customers to help them out with what are increasingly large portfolios of projects. You know, we really wanna just make sure that we're taking that blueprint that we've created in the United States on how to acquire companies, how to acquire additional customers, how do we build additional businesses and bench strength, and repeat that here in the European Union as well.
I think that I'm gonna turn this over to Josh now, and you'll hear a little bit more about the strategy that we've undertaken here in the European Union and hear from some of our partners and our new members of the Ameresco family. Make sure I don't fall going down. All right.
Thanks, Britta, good morning, everybody. Thanks again for attending our first European Analyst Day, as you've heard before. Gonna spend just a minute talking about M&A, which you've heard about a little bit abstractly so far from George and Britta. For those of you that aren't familiar with our history, M&A is not new to us at all. We've acquired and integrated well over 20 companies in the past 23 years, and that's really how we were able to grow from the three people around a cocktail napkin in a restaurant in 2000 to a public company in 2010. Now, as you heard, number one market share United States, number one in the public sector in the U.K., and hopefully eventually in the next few years, number one in Europe as well.
More importantly than going through the financial metrics and other details, maybe just the point here is that it's a very diversified portfolio. We've acquired businesses in our project segment, O&M segment, asset segment and other. More importantly than that is that we don't acquire manufacturing facilities. We don't acquire significant amounts of technology. What we're acquiring, because we're a services business, is people. What I think I'm the most proud of as we talk to investors about what we've done as a company, is we've been able to retain the key talent of the management team of many of the companies that we've acquired. We have executives from the United States that have been with us 13 years that came from acquisition. 14 years, 18 years.
We have folks in the room here today that we've acquired, that you'll hear from a little bit later, 10 years, almost 20 years. The entrepreneurs have stayed with our company. Why? Because we allow them to retain the entrepreneurial spirit that they have when they had their own companies. With the backing of a global corporation, with our ability to finance shared services like legal, accounting and whatnot. Really, what we allow them to do is continue to innovate for their customers, take care of their employees, and they take care of us. We love to do M&A, but it has to be a perfect fit, and I think we're really great, like I said, at keeping those people. This brings me back to our panel. Today I'm joined by some of the management teams of companies we've partnered with or acquired.
We've got Giorgio Pucci, he's the founder and chairman of Enerqos. Enrico Giglioli, he's the current CEO of Enerqos. We've got Konstantinos Zygouras, who is the CEO of Sunel Group, and I think many of you already know Doran, our CFO. I won't spend too much time in introductions. I think why don't we just jump right into the questions, which of course I forgot at my desk. I do remember the first one. It was to Doran. It was Doran. Tell us a little bit about Ameresco's M&A strategy and just the things we look for as we approach M&A, some of the criteria.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Josh. Great to see everyone here today. From an M&A perspective, we really look at the world in a very opportunistic way, right? We've seen the success of integration of a number of companies that Josh just demonstrated. I think that when we look at M&A opportunities, there's situation analysis. Then there's the kind of critical factors. We're looking for businesses that are going to be accretive for the company, both functionally and financially. We need strong management team. We look for, you know, this, I don't know, it's an attitude, it's a fit.
It's an understanding that the management team that we're bringing on board sees the world the way we do, not just from a, you know, an operational perspective, but from the perspective of, you know, future growth. How they expect to fit in within the larger organization. I think it's a great strategy. It's not something that we look at as a, you know, a must-have, a must do. We see M&A as a way to build a business. You know, we look at the right size of companies to acquire and basically feed their growth, right?
We've often found people who are looking to grow, who need that extra edge, that extra oomph of a large company like Ameresco, to bring track record, to bring financial capacity to the table.
Doran, would you say that Ameresco has a set target for M&A in any given year? A number of companies, amount of revenue or earnings growth from?
There's not. We don't bake in, you know, M&A, you know, required M&A into our future targets. We think about M&A so opportunistically that we don't wanna force ourselves into spending money on M&A. You know, we wanna be extraordinarily smart about it, and as a result, we don't have specifically set targets, right? We just go opportunistically.
We're joined here by, as I said, Konstantinos, one of our joint venture partners here in Europe. How does Ameresco decide to do a joint venture versus an acquisition? What drives that?
That's oftentimes situational, right? you know, there are some situations where acquisition is going to make sense. There are some situations where joint ventures are gonna make sense, right? What we gain from a joint venture is the ability to participate, to partner, to grow our own business, both again, functionally and financially. At the same time, operate in a fashion where perhaps it takes a little bit less oversight management. you know, clearly, joint ventures can be financially efficient if we're, you know, only contributing half or, you know, minority or slight majority of the equity contribution.
No set targets, does have to be a good fit. Really sort of much like our traditional business, as we serve customers it really situational dependent, whatever is best for the situation. Konstantinos, I'll turn to you. You run Sunel. That's one of our joint ventures, as I noted. What attracted you to Ameresco as a partner?
Oh, yes. Thanks a lot, Josh. I'm really excited to be here with you. There were five main points that made us partner with Ameresco. First of all, the brand name of Ameresco is well-known to everyone, well-established. And efficient in delivering sustainable solutions to the customers. The commitment to environmental sustainability fits perfect with our core values and mission. Second, it's also very important for us is this amazing team of Ameresco. From the first discussions, we saw people that are talented, well-informed about the market. What was also very important for us is the whole mentality and doing business with integrity and transparency. Again, we believe that this is a very strong foundation to have a long-term partnership.
Third point was the financial strength and strength of Ameresco. We see in the market the projects become larger and larger. Also both investors and financiers of these projects, they have high requirements that maybe are not easy to be met only from our company. By joining forces with Ameresco, we can undertake any size of project, including also battery storage projects. Fourth, also very important thing is the wide variety of services of Ameresco. As Sunel, we have focused in the previous years mainly in solar PV projects. We understand that in order to support our customers in their journey to sustainability, we need to have a much broader variety of services. As Mr. Sakellaris also said, a more holistic approach to support our customers.
Fifth is the main-- it's the general mindset of Ameresco, so people can be flexible and also innovative. In a market that continuously changes, if we don't change, then we're not gonna be successful. All these five important points made us ask ourselves, okay, why we should not partner with the leader of the market and have, let's say, a joint path, a joint journey, to be successful. We're very happy to be part of Ameresco family, and we're very keen in supporting for the future to become stronger and better.
Excellent. Thanks.
If there's--
Oh, did somebody have a-- No. Okay, Giorgio, you have a very successful career in large corporations, technology, global leadership roles, in very large corporations, as I've noted. Once you were running and founded Enerqos, when Ameresco first approached you, what attracted you to Ameresco? The opposite.
When we started to talk with Ameresco, the company main shareholder was a fund. You know, the fund, useful but especially on the short-term strategy. What I was looking was an industrial partner, financially strong, but also very innovative, which is, by the way, the story of my life. We found exactly Ameresco fitting in our strategy. As I could say, quite rapidly, we reach an agreement, and we are now part of Ameresco.
Excellent. Enrico, also a successful career of global leadership roles in very large domestic and international corporations. Now that we've closed the sale, this was March 30, everybody, you're running our Italian operations. Describe some of the early benefits you're seeing now being part of our company versus being part of a smaller independent company?
Yes. We closed the deal, end of March already. In this first month together with Ameresco, we put together initiative to, well, to become the number one in Italy, the number one in Europe, as Giorgio was saying before. Our target is really to become the leader in this business. We are putting together the Ameresco product range because, as Konstantinos was saying before, it's important to leverage the product range that Ameresco has developed in U.S. and bring it to the European customer. For example, we were not focused on biogas, biomethane, but now that we have Ameresco on board, we can offer our clients in Italy also this solution. Secondly, we put together our strength on the financial side.
As Giorgio was saying, as a small company, we were not addressing a big part of the market where financial scale is needed in order to approach bigger, larger projects, now we are doing that. We have already a pipeline or large projects being developed that being an independent company would not be addressable. The third one is really the brand and the history of Ameresco that is helping us both with clients and suppliers, but also with talents and people development. Because as Giorgio was saying, this is a business also particularly of people. Really, the Ameresco Group is one of the recognized leader in U.S., and we have this objective to make the leader even in Europe.
We feel that really the difference also in our recruiting and talent development to attract the best people in our team and provide the best service for our clients. We are really positioned as a very high quality provider in Italy, so we serve already multinational customers. Of course, we want to further improve to position us as the best in the market for quality, delivery, and cost of the solution.
Great. Let's see. It sounds like culture, sounds like the strategic vision, as well as the ability to leverage our global resources. I think that's kind of the summary from our, from our three partners. Back to Konstantinos. We're working on the Delfini project together, but there was a press release a few weeks ago about a much larger opportunity set. Can you talk a little bit about those opportunities and some others that you're pursuing with us?
Yes, of course. For those that don't know, Delfini is a 100 MW project, solar PV project, in Greece. It's a very difficult project, as also Britta said, it's part of a mountain. During this project, we managed to overcome many challenges of the project and to meet all the requirements of a very demanding customer, which is a third generation. We managed to establish the strong lines of communication with Ameresco and understand that, actually, we aligned our strategy for EPC business in Europe.
All the energy investors, they knew Ameresco, and also they knew Sunel individually, but they were extremely excited to see that we partnered so that we could jointly deliver more projects with high quality on time. As you know, this is a big problem, a big bottleneck for these energy investors, how they can actually implement and construct the projects. Currently, we're bidding, we're invited to bid for 1.5 GW of projects in different countries in Europe, mainly U.K., Spain, Italy, Greece, and Romania. Although I cannot disclose more information since the bidding processes are ongoing, we feel quite confident that we can be awarded a significant part of this pipeline.
This is only the beginning because we have started also discussing with more customers for more projects. We aim to become one of the key players in the EPC business in Europe. In addition, we are also examining other opportunities for energy efficiency, for battery storage projects. I think the future is bright, and we can see a lot of things happening with Ameresco in the future. As I said, this is a long-term collaboration for us, and we aim to do a lot of things.
Giorgio or Enrico, where's the growth coming from in the Italian energy efficiency renewable sector, and how will Ameresco continue to win?
The growth is coming first from what Giorgio was saying before. There is an economic convenience to save energy. This, all our customer realize this, particularly in the last year when there was the gas crisis. The growth is coming from the awareness of customers that, by doing energy efficiency or producing energy or a newer source is economical convenient. The growth is coming also on regulation, because also government has realized this is an important piece also for the economic recovery of Europe and Italy. For example, we see the next European directive on the building energy efficiency that, is under discussion, but will impose a very stringent target on retrofitting the buildings to improve the energy efficiency.
In Italy, we are talking about half of the buildings that are at the moment in Italy that need to be retrofitted in order to reduce the energy consumption by 30%-50%, for example. Also regulation has realized this is an important things to do. Third, of course, economic convenience is becoming more and more convenient because, I mean, the solutions that we provide to customers, the costs are really more and more convenient. Also I think that the brand, also the image that the customer wants to project outside is more and more on green and sustainability.
There is also this third, very important element that since the customer become more aware of the importance to be green, also the companies become more and more important to show the customer, the stakeholders, that they follow this green path.
Energy savings and some desire to decarbonize, just like we've seen in the United States.
Yeah.
Vicky, if you're ready, if there's any questions in the audience, happy to open up the panel here so you don't have to just hear me all day. Anyone? I'll give you another chance before I finish up. The whole panel, maybe we'll start, Giorgio, with you. When many investors, at least in the United States, think about renewables or efficiency in Europe, they think about the majors like Engie, E.ON, Enel, Acciona, et cetera. In the U.S., at least, we tend to think of Europe as actually ahead of the U.S. in terms of efficiency and renewables. You have smaller cars, you were early adopters to lighting, there were the large German and Spanish, Italian subsidies for renewable energy in the early 2000s.
What is the opportunity set remaining, and what is the competitive environment look like for a company like ourselves?
Thank you for the question. The point is that I already saw this transition from major incumbents to more effective companies 20 years ago when I was at Nokia running the operation in South- Europe, was at the time the move from the big players like France, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom, and into the mobile business. If you go back and think what did happen at the time, these giants did not realize that the world was changing, and it's exactly the same now. The big Enel, Engie, and so on, E.ON, are still too much focused on gas, traditional gas, traditional retail, while the industry is moving into another direction, which is the energy efficiency, the new way of producing electricity, photovoltaic, aeolian, and not only because for instance, I mean, we have mentioned RNG, which will be a major fact into the next production of gas.
Remember that, I mean, we are the problem with Russia and Ukraine, but I mean, going after Egypt or Algeria is not exactly very safe. The best for us in Europe is manufacturing the electricity using the renewables. This is, this will be a paradigm shift, which is already happening.
Let's say the big companies are potentially failing to innovate. Enrico, what's your opinion?
I think that when you have such a shift in the market, in the industry, and that we need basically to build a new way of doing business, because, I mean, as Giorgio was saying, until two years ago, we were running with carbon intensity, and now next 10 years, we need to half the carbon consumption. This is a tremendous market because we have to rebuild all the ways to produce energy, so with clean energy, and we have to reduce by at least by 50% our consumption of the energy, no? You can imagine how many plants you need to build, because at the moment there are these large plants with large carbon.
When a new market opens up, it's, well, it's fair to say that also new players could win. These market incumbents are not incumbents, no? Because the market is new. It's true that the incumbents have their history, their brand, so of course. I think that we are starting from the same lane, we can pick our large share, no? Because it's not the incumbent market. It's a new market where incumbents on a very similar market try to compete, but we are a newcomer, we are all new here, so.
Thanks. Konstas?
Yes, just a little bit about opportunities in the EPC business. We're seeing that apart from the traditional energy investors, now we have a new generation of energy investors that are very keen in investing heavily. They are quite aggressive, and they all need strong EPC companies to support them. As I said, the bottleneck for them is always the construction, the implementation of their business plan. We see that the demand for such EPC contractors is very high, and the current companies cannot cover this demand. This comes an opportunity for us. As Brita said before, our aim is to find these companies, these investors that fit to our profile, support them, and follow them in the different market they have projects.
Most of them, they have projects in multiple countries that in the range of the countries that interest us. Together with the abilities of Ameresco and ours, we believe that we can get a significant part of the pie.
A local presence with kind of a global backing. Doran, we focused mostly on continental Europe on this panel so far, but there was some opportunistic M&A in Ireland over the past few years. Talk a bit about what drove those opportunities and what the future might hold there.
Yeah, sure. The Ireland is a tremendous place for wind resource, and I think we've seen it kind of front and center. What we discovered early on was that there was an ability on a bilateral basis to come in and purchase some operating wind turbines that could be, you know, refurbed sometime between, you know, the immediate post-acquisition to two or three years later, which had either existing PPAs, and also Ireland had a fairly healthy wholesale market. We went in, and we've managed to buy a couple of a couple of assets on bilateral terms. These are assets that were, you know, oftentimes developed and owned and built by the farmers that own the land.
They were at a point in time where they were ready to effectively cash out a bit, and we felt like the value proposition was there for us. With a wholesale market that has, you know, very strong electricity prices, the availability of offtake in the form of, you know, Corporate PPA, even in the absence of any government incentive programs, presented a great opportunity for us. We could come in, buy an operating asset, immediately start seeing cash flows, start seeing EBITDA from the projects, and then over the course of the next year or two, do some refurb.
Repower these wind farms and see them increase production and obviously increase revenue. It's been a great strategy, and I think that we see plenty more opportunity there for that one.
I'm gonna take a little bit of a cue from George here. What's next?
What's next? Well, we're just getting started, right? I think back to what the guys were saying, you know, there's a combination of factors going on here in Europe, right? The built environment still has a tremendous amount of aging infrastructure that we can come in and do work on reducing consumption by replacing, you know, the traditional energy infrastructure. That is without question there. Secondly, large scale renewables continue to be built. As we talked about with Sunel, we've got this joint bidding platform that we're going after some really nice large projects. Renewable energy in the form of offshore wind has been rolling out in Europe.
I think there's kind of this follow on of the need for battery storage, where we see a tremendous amount of opportunities for battery storage across the continent. Lastly, you know, despite the history of incentives in Europe and how it's kind of far ahead of, you know, North America, the truth is there's, you know, this trend for, you know, cities going net zero. We're obviously gonna hear from Bristol. We, we think that that is going to only be met, this desire to go to net zero, this desire for a carbon-free economy, has to be met not just with this utility scale, but also with plenty of distributed generation. I think that we've set ourselves up nicely for that.
Great. Sounds like a little bit of opportunistic geographic expansion and exciting markets like battery storage and whatnot. Open it up to the audience one last time. A couple minutes left in the panel here.
I think from my perspective in the U.S., right? You have a business that's extremely successful in the U.S. You're expanding into Europe. Just curious, what are the biggest challenges you see to sort of both successful on the execution front and the financial side? I imagine the JVs and acquisitions help you get over that. Could you talk a little bit about sort of how you think about those risks relative to doing business in the U.S.?
Sure. I might throw that to Doran.
Yeah, sure. I'll start with the fact that we, you know, one of the challenges, of course, is competition. How do you win deals, right? The answer has been these three here, right? Our other partners that we're working with. I think with the U.K., we, you know, address those challenges by virtue of showing up with expertise and bringing the track record. Winning deals is challenge number one, right? I think that it's all about making sure that you're local and local expertise. We talk ad nauseam about this in the U.S., about the way we win deals is by being local to 60 offices around the globe, right? We're really working to do the same thing here, right? That's, that's kind of number one.
In terms of other challenges, I think the, you know, we need to ensure that we manage project risks, of course. That's something where, when you're building a PV plant, right, you think about mechanical risk or the risk of, you know, choosing the right products, et cetera. The sequencing, making sure you've got access to labor. There you get that combination of factors where you need the locals who understand the local market, but you need folks like Ameresco with this track record of having managed those exact same risks in other projects. They do look similar when you get into the nuts and bolts of the mechanical, the electrical, right, the civil installation. I think those are the two big ones.
I don't know, Josh, if you have does it come to mind.
No, I think that's well said. Anything else? About a minute left. Probably last call for this panel. There will be another Q&A session towards the end of the event.
Of course.
If you don't get a chance in this piece here. Nothing else. Okay. Let's see if I can leave it, the group with three points here. It's that M&A is definitely important part of Ameresco strategy, but we'll only do so if it is accretive and if there's a strategic fit. I think, of course, we need to make sure we can rely on the strength of the management team. Thanks again to our panelists here and thanks to all of you all online and in the room for your interest in Ameresco. I get to now pass it over to Leila for her panel on the U.K. specifically. Thanks again, everyone.
Okay. Here we are. Hard to beat Josh's panel, but I do have my questions, Josh. I'm off to a pretty good start here. Okay. As we thought about the different kinds of content that we could bring to you today, we started with wanting to give you some insight in terms of some of the strategic locations we're looking for expansion into Europe.
We then thought even it more exciting for you to actually meet one of our recent acquisitions, the Enerqos team, and also one of our great partners, Sunel, and you saw the press release that came out just recently on the great developments that we're looking to do with them. The next step we thought that would be helpful is to drill down a little bit and take a closer look at how we've been able to successfully grow a company and our series of companies so well in the U.K. and really use that as a template as we think about our growth in some of those other regions. This panel is really all about that.
It's about taking a moment, stepping back, looking at specifically what we've been able to do in the U.K. and understanding some of the mechanics behind how we were able to achieve that kind of growth. Okay. Maybe it would start by putting up the slide for this panel. Josh, maybe I spoke too quickly before. Okay, before we get started and I start going through some questions, you've already heard from me today. You've also already heard from Britta, I thought it would be helpful if I asked both Mark and Kath to do a quick introduction of themselves. Mark Apsey is our Managing Director of our U.K. London office.
Mark, would you just give us a little bit of color around your background here?
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Leila. Great to see you all. So I'm Mark Apsey. I'm a chartered chemical engineer by background, and I've been working in the energy space for over two decades, and with Ameresco since the acquisition of a company called Energyexcel back in 2014. So I'm one of the nearly 10 years that Josh was mentioning, who've stayed within the business. Back then, it was a really exciting time. We built a business from 2007, which was focused on energy efficiency solutions within the commercial and industrial sector. We had some great success with customers like GlaxoSmithKline, and Sainsbury's, which we did a lot of work for, in the early days.
When we became part of Ameresco, we were able to really go on another journey and use Ameresco's financial strength and experience in the public sector to then establish ourselves in the U.K. doing all the things that Ameresco does. All of the projects, all the O&M services, all of the asset-type deals across all technologies and all sectors. That's how we got here today.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Kath Chapman is the Managing Director of our U.K. Leeds office. Kath, can you give a little introduction for yourself?
Good morning, everybody. Yes, I'm Kath Chapman. I've been in the energy sector now for over 30 years. Actually the business that I founded was actually acquired by Ameresco 10 years ago next month, actually. I am one of those people who stayed within Ameresco. One of the things that really attracted Ameresco to us as a business was we very much look after the industrial and commercial sector. That's our client base. Whilst we could provide them with consultancy services and lots of carbon services, we felt that by joining Ameresco, we could really broaden that service offering to our client base and give them, you know, to tack the phrase, the one-stop shop, so we could provide them with sort of physical and engineering solutions as well as the commercial solutions that we were already offering.
Great. Great. For those of you that have been carefully following the words, carbon reporting and carbon consulting, sneak peek, we're gonna get to that in a little bit, but that's really what Kath's group is all about.
Yes.
which is, of course, one of the hottest topics right now. Before we go there, if we could just jump back a little bit. Britta, I'm gonna lean to you to answer this first question. You know, we've heard so much about the growth of the U.K. and what we've been able to do and how we were able to get to that number one position. Can you take us back a little bit? I mean, I remember five years ago when I joined Ameresco, we were not there yet. Can you talk a little bit about the mechanics behind that growth? How were you able to put that in place? What are some of the details that have to come together in order for us to see that kind of growth?
Yeah, sure. You know, as Mark said, you know, when we acquired Energyexcel, they were really focused on the C&I space and had some really strong partnerships and relationships with clients, like GlaxoSmithKline, like Sainsbury's, as Mark had mentioned. What we were missing was that public sector side of the business to really make us a totally well-rounded entity. Breaking into the public sector marketplace is just a completely different animal, as you probably know with our federal business in the U.S. It really requires, you know, a strong portfolio that you can demonstrate, you know, superb execution, technical capability, project and construction management skills, all of these things, as well as financial strength, the ability to bond projects, the ability to guarantee savings.
Breaking into that public sector market was really one of our very first goals, and that required understanding the marketplace, understanding what the competitive landscape was going to be. In here in the U.K., they established much like in the U.S., frameworks. You had to bid into becoming a participant on the framework, which then allowed you permission to bid for tenders that would be released by public sector entities.
Part of what we had to do was, you know, work together with our clients, I mean, with our colleagues in the States, to be able to respond, to get onto those frameworks, to show that we had a portfolio of successful projects already from all of our experience in the U.S., that we had that staying power, that we could make guarantees on financial and savings performance and back those things up. That was really the first order of business, was getting on that first framework and then the second framework and then the third framework and every framework that we could get on that was public sector related. The second thing was to figure out how to win those projects.
You know, and we really had such a strong body of work in the U.S. and examples of really incredible proposal responses that we were able to lean on our colleagues all around the US to help us develop our own really compelling proposal and tender responses. That we could start winning those first projects. The very first project that we won, Scottish Colleges, was on I think my first slide up in Scotland. You know, it was just an extraordinary opportunity for us to enter and to break into the public sector marketplace.
I'm really proud that over those five, six, now seven, almost eight years, you know, we now hold a leading position in the public sector for businesses of our kind, from a dead stop, you know, from scratch, from nothing, eight years ago. It really speaks to not only the bench strength that we have in London and in the U.K. offices, just an extraordinary group of engineers and project managers and construction managers, but just the value of having such a strong parent company behind us that we could also lean on for additional technical capabilities, for financial strength, just for the confidence to say, "Go for this. We've got your back." And it's paid off over time. Really excited where we're at.
Great. That's great. I mean, I personally remember you flying back and forth every other week, essentially, right, to help provide that support system. As it stands now.
Lots of air miles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great. Great. Mark, do you wanna talk a little bit, I mean Britta just sort of walked us through. I think it's so important as we think about especially replicating this in another region. We need to get into those frameworks, we need to have those capabilities if we're gonna penetrate a market and start developing a portfolio. Can you talk to us a little bit about a particular customer that you can, that you wanna share? Kind of walk us through that process from the customer side of it.
Yeah, no, sure. Yeah, once you, as Britta says, get into the public sector and establish yourself with a first project, and we've now grown to be delivering projects for lots and lots of public sector customers across the U.K. I think, largely driven by the expertise that Britta and Ameresco brought to us, but also that real focus as an independent company, so we can pick the best solutions as a customer-focused business, and then execution. Once we'd executed the first one, it was a bit of a snowball. I guess one of the projects I wanted to talk about most recently is a project we did for the University of West London, which is a really interesting site.
They've got a site out there, surrounded by housing, very constrained from a geographical perspective, and ambitions to get to net zero, not just because that's the right thing to do and they want to do it, but because it also encourages more students to come into the university and they're more making choices about that. They're really imperative. We help them win, the first round of Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme grant funding, for this particular building. The reason the project's so exciting for me is that it's a combination of new technologies that has not been put together anywhere else and has taken that building almost completely, at St. Mary's Road, completely down to zero carbon, with some gas backup for winter.
How we did it was by using solar PV thermal panels, 584 panels on the roof. We put in 16 ground source heat pumps connected to 34 vertical boreholes, so 100, 150, 170 meters deep 'cause we couldn't do loops for the ground source. There's no land there. We got all that installed. It's the first project, grant funded under the scheme, the first project delivered under that Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme. We just got through the first winter, and I don't think they had to turn the gas boilers on at all in that building. Yeah, a really good example of executing and building on that success.
Wow. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. In your situation, I know, Mark, because we've worked together on some pieces, it's very common that you'll do a sort of a phase one of a project with a council or a municipality or something like that, and then go back and do more. Do you wanna--
Well, that's right. For University of West London, in fact, that project I just talked about was the second, third phase, I think, actually, of work we'd done with them previously. It does just show the benefit, and everyone's talked about it, I think, already on this stage, of executing really well and then going back and the customer wants you to come back and do the next project and the next project and the next project. That's what we've seen a lot of in the U.K.
Right. Right. Now, something that I think is very exciting that we've seen in the U.K., and we expect that that will sort of follow into other regions too, is this idea that you don't necessarily have to do it piecemeal and start with phase I, phase II, phase III, that, in fact, I'm looking at someone over across the room over there, you can actually think about this holistically and think about the entire decarbonization and net zero journey and put in place a plan to do the entire thing. You can't do it in a year, you can't do it in a few, but you actually can create an overall comprehensive plan to think about all of the things that you need to do.
Yeah. No. Well, that's right. I mean, you're talking about Bristol City Leap. Okay. Clearly. It is a world first. I think it's a really good initiative. The piecemeal approach is not gonna get us to net zero quickly enough. Some of the projects we do, the procurement takes longer than the project itself. Just simple math says that means we're never gonna get to our targets.
What Bristol have done, and we'll hear from Kye in a minute about the customer side of the journey, is set out their piece, recognizing that they couldn't do it on their own, they didn't have the capital themselves to do it, and to come out to the market and say, "What we really need is a long-term energy partner to help us transition, deal with our estate, decarbonize that, but then also land in Bristol and expand and address the commercial industrial markets there, the other public sector organizations there, and help with the wider domestic retrofits and work that needs to go on." I think that project is a great example and something that's particularly replicable elsewhere.
We're already seeing more interest from other cities who are looking closely at Bristol City Leap as an example of how to do this on a large scale. I think for Bristol, we've committed with our partners, Vattenfall, to spending over GBP 400 million in the first five years of the project to decarbonize. That's everything. That's retrofitting buildings, the traditional energy efficiency work. It's rooftop solar, it's ground mount solar, it's onshore wind, battery energy storage, microgrid, EV charging infrastructure. You know, there is no limit to the technologies we can deploy there. We've done the procurement. All we have to do within the Bristol state itself is come up with the projects, put the business cases forward, and then roll through those.
That's why I think it's so appealing for other cities, because they've all set targets for net zero, different years. In the U.K. particularly, we had a kind of rash of that in 2019. 90% of local authorities have declared a date to get to net zero and a climate emergency. Now City Leap is offering a real pathway to get there. So yeah, very exciting project.
Yeah. Can't wait to hear more about it in just a little bit. Great. One of the things that you were talking about, Mark Apsey, is that sort of net zero and decarbonization journey. So much of the work that we do, we might start at the very beginning of that, or we might be able to do the entire sort of plan for that. That brings me back to you, Kath, because this is such a hot topic. I think, you know, 10 years ago when you came over to the Ameresco team, I think it was sort of in the very beginning of people understanding what that is, why it's important, why you wanna think about that now. Verse fast-forward today, where you really can't have a conversation with a prospect or a customer, and that's not a top topic that they're talking about.
Can you talk a little bit more about the work that you do and also how that has evolved so much and also the work that you do, how it relates to the rest of the Ameresco team, and how we're sort of bringing those services forward for everyone to have the benefit of?
I think it's very true to say that 10 years ago, sort of the carbon agenda was kind of bubbling along, as opposed to being right at the top of the agenda. The U.K. also had a regulatory framework that sort of supported carbon reporting fairly early on. The U.K. government introduced something called Streamlined Energy Carbon Reporting, which is a mandatory reporting system of emissions, which any company over a certain size has to include within their statutory returns, within their annual reports and accounts, and files on companies out. It had an environment that was already lending itself to forcing companies to think about their carbon emissions. Obviously, we established a service to do that.
Then we realized that actually, as a business, we were used to dealing with complex energy data, which was a large driver of the carbon emissions, and therefore we could roll that service out. If we fast-forward now to where, you know, so many businesses have stated their carbon goals, it's not just in the public sector, it's across all large businesses, including many multinationals. Most have a statement that by 2030 they will be here, or by 2035 they will be carbon neutral. Which gave us a great opportunity to increase that service offering, and to work with the rest of the Ameresco team to work out how we could actually help them deliver those ambitions.
You know, whether it's commercial solutions in the form of commercial power purchase agreements, or whether it's actual, you know, on-site generation, distributed generation solutions. What we've seen now over the last sort of 18 months to two years is now stability and security of supply has also gone right up the agenda. As you're looking at that, it's a great time to look at ESG at the same time. As I say, what we can do is offer sort of commercial solutions and the long-term engineering solutions as well to really help organizations get to that clean net zero and provide the reporting package as well. Carbon reporting is one of those services. It was kind of, it was born global.
Right.
You know? That we had to establish that from the very outset, which is what we did with the service provision that we give to our customer base.
It's so, it's so great because, you know, 10 years ago, George had the insight to know that this was gonna be something that was gonna be very important to our future. You know, what's so fun for us now is, especially with the ESG pressures that are out there, and so many people looking to accomplish some net zero and decarbonization goals, this is a great launchpad for customers that we have yet to be able to work with. You know? Let's just start here and help create a program and a plan, and then be able to use the rest of the things that Ameresco does in our whole solution wheel and implement that plan.
Yeah.
It really is, you know, the beginning of the whole discussion now, and it's one that whether we're here in Europe or whether we're back in the States, it's becoming a critical element to what Ameresco has as an offering.
Yeah, one of the big challenges is creating a platform that is both robust and auditable, particularly when you're working in some jurisdictions that may not have the quality of data, emissions data that, you know, we see in most European countries and we see in the US. You know, for companies that operate in lots of, you know, different jurisdictions, that's part of the challenge, coming up with something that is robust and auditable and can be reported.
I experienced that challenge directly. I'm part of our ESG ambassador team, spearheaded by Doran over there, and we went through the very fun process of capturing our own carbon. What was most exciting, I think, for Doran and I, and certainly George, was that in order to do that, we were able to lean into the technology we already have. Tim Dettlaff is sitting in the back of the room, his team with AssetPlanner and of course Kath Chapman and her team. We already had the tools in-house to be able to capture our own carbon baseline and also have that auditable track record, which we were able to publish in our recent ESG report that just came out. By the way, we have QR codes in the back room that you can download that report if you wanna have a look at it.
Shout out to you for your help for that for sure. I wanna open it up for questions right now. Do we have any questions? I have a couple more topics that I'd love to go through, but if we have questions from the audience, I wanna make sure we save some time for that. Wow, you're all so nice. You don't wanna put anybody on the hot seat here. Huh? I will, because I have some questions, and I like to put people on the hot seat. Mark, back to you. Can you talk a little bit about competition? Because especially as we grow a business and we're able to make traction, we have to recognize that there are competitors in the space.
How were you really able to differentiate Ameresco as you know, as George mentioned, so many different competitors, for instance, in the Bristol City Leap project, what makes us stand out, and how are you able to build those building blocks so that we really are a differentiated offering?
Right. No, yeah, sure. I mean, in the U.K. particularly, we see categories of competitors in three general buckets that I think of. We come up against utility companies particularly, who are doing some energy services and trying to get into that space and do a little bit on the side, if you like. We come up against facilities management businesses who are looking at the soft services and the FAM, but then are often tasked in the course of looking after assets to do energy efficiency, but probably not their core. We come up against the traditional equipment suppliers who are doing energy services, particularly to sell their own products and their own technologies. The way that I think we're very different.
By the way, in the UK, I think in fact, we've got one of the largest energy services teams, even against some of those big companies, because they have much smaller teams doing what we do as opposed to a big comprehensive offering that's just targeted on only this. It is to do with what I spoke about earlier, really, which is our independence. We're able to look at the customer need, really understand what they want, and then come back with the solution that works ideally for them. You know, in Bristol City Leap, it was a big invitation to tender. There was lots of outcome-based criteria that we had to meet. We really had to get under the skin.
I spent hours and hours in meetings with customers along with the team to understand exactly what was trying to be achieved there, so that when we put our bid in and we put our proposal forward, it really hit all of the things that they wanted, the carbon savings, the renewable generation, the big social value elements that a big contract like and 20-year concession agreement like Bristol allows us to really dig in and do more of in terms of local jobs, and investment in the local community and all those sorts of things. It's being able to listen, I think, be free, be independent, and then deliver what the customer wants.
I'd actually take that one step further and say, because of those other companies, you know, this is all we do. Our priority as a company, as a corporation, is to deliver these services day in and day out for our customers. These other companies that may be an offshoot of an electric of a utility company, an offshoot of a facilities management company, an offshoot of a manufacturer, their priorities change depending on what their overall business plan happens to be in any particular year. We often see those competitors coming in and out of the marketplace. You know, there'll be a year when one will try to bid every single project we're bidding, and then all of a sudden they vaporize.
You're like, "What happened to them?" Having some staying power in the marketplace and being able to demonstrate that no matter what's going on in the you know, in the climate or the environment, we're here, lends a lot of credibility when customers are making a selection of a partner that they wanna have for the long term.
What about too, Britta, the fact that our approach here is different, and it has been really since the inception of the company. It's all about being objective. We don't manufacture our own products. We really focus on bringing in the best-of-breed technology, knowing and staying up to speed with the latest, the most advanced technologies, and recognizing that every environment is different, every customer goal is different, every situation is different. It's really critical that we come with that sort of clean slate and make the recommendations that we think are going to be best suited. Is that something that has sort of resonated here?
Yeah, without question. I think that, you know, it gives us so much. Being independent gives us so much freedom to develop the right solution that creates the best value for the customer. You know, we're not encumbered by a need to sell a particular product or to get that product that our parent company may make, you know, into a customer's facility. You know, our engineers are looking at trying to solve problems, you know, and figure out the best solution for customers. I think it would be easier sometimes to be part of a different organization or a bigger organization that has all those other things, right? To generate leads and all that.
Being fully independent is by, you know, by far, hands down, the absolute best way to go about creating credibility with our customers, and having the freedom to develop, you know, solutions that really do take the needs of the customer first and foremost.
Yeah.
I would add to that as well. That's what gets our engineers excited. Right? Because they get to think about all the possible solutions that we can deploy and bespoke that. If it's new clean technology coming along, yeah, we can get into that and deploy it. I f it makes sense. That keeps our team really interested and engaged as well.
Yeah. And allows us to not only recruit and seek out those really great engineers and technical people and construction managers and project managers that wanna work for the company, but also to retain the ones that we have. Because they are working on the cool projects, you know. You've got a lot of technical people in the room on our management team here. You know, I mean, it's just, you know, we like to do these kinds of projects. Having that freedom to do it really makes all the difference.
Great. That's great. Kath, how about for you, especially as you know, having the rest of the Ameresco portfolio, is that something that's very helpful in knowing that you can come in from the consulting side and help quite a bit, but also have the implementation teams to do the work as helpful as a next step?
Absolutely. I think one of the sort of the beauties of Ameresco, just to go back to what others have said, is it is customer focused. It also allows you to be innovative. It still has that entrepreneurial feel. Even though you're part of a big organization, you know, if there's a new service line you need to offer, a new product line, you know, it's very supportive of taking it to the market and taking it to the market quickly.
If I sit and listen to one of my customers and they sort of want something specific, you know, it's within my remit to be able to go and source and deliver that very, very quickly. Whereas in some of the larger sort of organizations, particularly say the utilities, it's a much slower process.
You can't react to what the customer or what the market needs you to do. Whereas within Ameresco, you can, and you've got the whole suite of offerings that you can bring to the table. Which makes a tremendous difference because it's not just a consultancy offering, it's an end-to-end solution offering.
That's great. That's fantastic. Britta, I'm gonna come back to you on this last question. We have time for one more. It's got to go so fast, doesn't it? Can you talk a little bit about what's next? I know, you know, back in the States, we're seeing so many microgrids and battery storage and a lot of the advanced technologies come into play for sort of the next step of projects that we're working on. Can you talk about what you see here in the U.K. and what, you know, where you think things are going, and where the big growth opportunities are here?
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, in the built environment, the implementation of advanced technologies is obviously first and foremost, right? Renewable energy generation, as you mentioned, battery energy storage, microgrids, all of those kinds of things, we're starting to see that on a much larger, broader scale, and our customers sort of demanding those things, understanding the value of that in their facilities. I really do see that, and this is one of the reasons why we're so excited about Bristol City Leap, is this opportunity to really make transformational change all at one time. When I first started working here in the U.K., I used to joke around about the fact that, you know, our customers were in love with pilot projects. They love to just do test projects.
Nobody would, you know, go and do these large, comprehensive, holistic projects. That's really changing now. People realizing if you're gonna meet the goals in the timelines that are set up, you need to take that bold step forward and really address everything all in one fell swoop. I think that we're just starting to see other sort of fear of missing out, you know, other councils sort of looking over the wall at Bristol and going, "Wait a minute, I want one of those too." That also provides us with a great opportunity to continue to expand the work that we're doing around the U.K.
Yeah. I think that's great.
Yeah.
Fantastic. Good. Good, good. All right. Well, thank you so much to this panel. Super appreciative to have you all up here. I think it's perfect time now to move over to our next session. Hopefully, you're able to get your microphone all set. Yes. Oh. Okay, great. Great. We have Bristol City Councillor, Kye Dudd, sharing with us the Bristol City Leap story.
There we go. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Stand here or we go down?
Yeah. Wherever you're comfortable, after you are finished, Doran comes, okay?
Yeah, lovely. Thank you. Right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for inviting me along to speak today. It's always a delight to speak to an audience about what is our flagship energy policy in Bristol. I've personally been working on it for about five or six years now. I'm always delighted to speak about it for two reasons. The first one, for the last three or four years, it's been commercially sensitive, I've not been able to say anything about it. Secondly, I think this policy will transform Bristol, also I believe it's replicable across the U.K., potentially it can be replicated across Europe as well.
I'll just give you a little bit of context in terms of Bristol because I realize not everybody here is from Bristol. It's one of the nine Core Cities, so the biggest Core Cities outside of London. It's in the west of England. Population's about 470,000. The economy is quite mixed, but historically it was based around the port, but there's the aerospace industry there. It's quite a successful economy. As I said, it's a mixed economy. We're probably, and I think we are the leading city in the U.K. on decarbonization and climate work. In terms of our comparatives, there's other cities that do really well. Glasgow hosted COP27. They're really good. Nottingham in terms of transport are quite good.
I think Bristol is the leading city in terms of the climate and decarbonization agenda. We've had officers in the city working on this all the way back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and in 2015, we were the European Green Capital city, that was quite a proud achievement for the city to get that. On a number of measures, I think we're really good. We've got the lowest carbon footprint per capita out of all our competitor cities in the core cities. We've reduced as a city our carbon emissions by 40% since 2005. The council was a corporate entity since 2015.
We've reduced our emissions by 50% since 2015. We were the first city to declare a climate emergency in the U.K. in November 2018. After that, you had the kind of domino effect around the U.K. of other local authorities declaring a climate emergency, other organizations like universities and health trusts for example. After declaring that climate emergency, what that meant is our original target was 2040 as a city to become carbon neutral. Our target was moved forward to 2030. Also as a corporate estate, our target moved from 2030 to 2025 to become carbon neutral as a corporate entity.
In terms of delivery across the city over the last five or six years or so, we've managed to invest about GBP 100 million in decarbonization projects. As Britta mentioned, they would probably be seen as sort of pilot projects. They've been investments in wind turbines, solar farms, retrofit on our own social housing stock, so we've invested in about 10,000 of our properties to bring them up to a much better standard. We've also started to develop a heat network with that investment. Also, there's a big community energy sector in the city as well that we're very keen on supporting.
I think given the context and the financial challenge that local authorities face, we've lost GBP 0.60 in every pound of support that we get from government in terms of funding under the current government. It's a massive challenge for a city to face, given that, you know, we've got the day job of looking after people, children in care, looking after older people in society, making sure the streets are cleaned. I think that GBP 100 million investment, given the context of where local government is in terms of funding, was really good.
In 2018, 'cause we're quite serious about this issue, you know, we really wanna get things done in Bristol, so we asked ourselves the question, "Well, how much would it actually cost to deliver a net zero city?" We didn't have all the information, but best guess at that point, the figure we came up with was about GBP 5 billion. The gap in terms of what we were delivering, around GBP 100 million of investment to GBP 5 billion, is absolutely huge. Quite clearly, we don't have the money, as the city of Bristol. The U.K. government isn't stepping up and funding cities to that extent to deliver decarbonization.
We asked ourselves the question, is there any potential for private sector investment to come into the city to help us deliver the large-scale investments that we know and large-scale infrastructure projects that we know are needed? What we did all the way back in 2018 was we pulled together the Bristol City Leap prospectus. It's been to a few meetings over the years, so it's quite battered at the moment. In theory, this is what we called soft market testing. We basically outlined in here about GBP 1 billion worth of investable energy opportunities in the city. Not too much detail, but that is kind of a sort of an educated guess from our energy service within the council.
If we had GBP 1 billion, these are the kind of projects that we can do we could get done pretty quickly. It's things like expansion of the heat network, investment in renewable energy, retrofit of commercial and residential buildings, potentially hydrogen opportunities, marine energy. It was our best guess at putting together potential projects. We put this out to the market in May 2018. We did have some support from the Department of International Trade, so the government did support us with this. We basically said, got a closing date the end of August that year. If you're interested in coming into Bristol to help us deliver some of these projects, please get back to us and let us know.
we have no idea, in terms of, would we get any interest at all, or would we be sort of overwhelmed with expressions of interest. by the close of play, August 2018, we received over 181 expressions of interest from around the world. Major organizations from Asia, the U.S., Europe, the U.K. These were major tech companies, major energy companies, contractors, Japanese conglomerates. You name it, we had an expression of interest.
We were completely overwhelmed with this as a city, and we really had to scratch our heads in terms of, well, how do we take this interest forward but also protect the interest of the city at the same time? What we decided to do was to go out to procurement for a strategic partner. We felt the best way to do this was to set up a joint venture company, where 50% of the shares would be owned by the city of Bristol, and then we'd offer the other 50% to the market in a competitive 10-tendering process. We also said, we think this is the best idea. If you think there's a better idea, you know, let us know.
We're open to considering other ways, other ways of doing it as well. That, so that process was launched. We went from 181 down to. Also we said, you could bid as a single entity, or you can come together as a consortium of organizations as well. We're quite relaxed about that. We went from 181 to a long list of 10, to three bidders, then two bidders. Finally, we're delighted to say that we had a preferred bidder, which we came to that conclusion in April last year, and delighted to say it was Ameresco alongside Vattenfall as the as an essential subcontractor, which is the Swedish State energy company.
Over the last year or so, we were in final negotiations trying to get the deal over the line, and we finally got that deal over the line in January this year. What did we give away as a city? We felt we had to give away a long-term concession really, to make it attractive to the private sector. The agreement is for 20 years. What we've given away as a city is the right of first refusal to do any decarbonization project on our land, or corporate estate and buildings for the next 20 years. Quite an opportunity.
You know, as I say, we're delighted to say that that was attractive to the private sector. I'm delighted to say that, you know, we've, we selected Ameresco as well, because I think given the ethos of the company in terms of your commitment to renewable energy and decarbonization, you're the perfect partners for us. Also, having Vattenfall as well alongside you as the Swedish State energy company, that, you know, I think that's a, you know, really, really great partnership for us as well. Also in terms of protections for the city, so it's not a completely exclusive agreement. Each project that comes forward has to go through a project acceptance criteria, where certain tests are met around best value and things like that.
There are protections for the public and the taxpayer in Bristol, making sure it is the best deal for the public. Mark mentioned that in the winning bid, the level of investment that would be required over the next five years be at least GBP 424 million. At least GBP 1 billion over the 20 years of the agreement. I'm delighted to say they are minimum figures, and we're much more We're very confident that the level of investment coming into the city will be much higher. The other thing that I was really delighted with was the level of social value in the winning bid. It works out at roughly GBP 61 million worth of social value coming into Bristol.
A lot of that through job creation. We think around about 1,000 jobs will be created through this process. A lot of that through the supply chain, but at least 410 of those jobs will be created in the Bristol postcode area. I'm delighted with that. Also there's a big commitment around apprenticeships, working with our local colleges and schools to inspire the next generation to go into the jobs that we need to decarbonize our city going forward. That was really great. There was also a major commitment around work, continuing the work with the community energy sector in Bristol, which is important for us because we don't have all the ideas. Sometimes the community has the best idea.
There's a sort of an open door policy with all the community energy groups in the city. They can come and talk to us, and we can go and talk to them. Also, a community benefit fund as well as part of the social value. As I say, I'm really delighted with the winning bid, really delighted that Ameresco are the partner for the next 20 years. Some of the projects that are on the ground at the moment. In terms of district heating, where Vattenfall are mainly the lead contractor on that will see about GBP 300 million of investment over the next five years in building out the district heating system across the city of Bristol.
The need and demand for heat is about 40% of the carbon footprint in Bristol. We know that we need 65,000 connections, the equivalent of 65,000 connections to the district heating system to meet that 2030 goal in the city. That's a major part of our strategy to deliver net zero. There are 207,000 buildings in Bristol, obviously other solutions will be required for those that can't connect to the district heating system. We've also got grant funded projects that are taking place at the moment. The Home Upgrade Grant that Ameresco are delivering at the moment.
Mark mentioned, over recent years, we would have had to go out to tender for those projects, but we've got a procured partner now, where we can just give them the job. As long as it meets all the, you know, the best value test, we don't have to waste time with a six-month tender process. We can really get out on the ground and get these projects delivered. Within the council, in terms of our own housing stock, in our 30-year business plan, we've budgeted GBP 80 million over the next 30 years to bring all our social housing stock up to at least an EPC C- standard. Ameresco can crack on and deliver that for us. We, as I said, we don't have to go out to procurement.
We can get on with it straight away. As I said at the start, I think this is groundbreaking. No other city in the U.K. has taken this approach, and to my knowledge, no other city in Europe has taken this approach with a long-term strategic partner. This procurement was done under EU procurement regulations, so it can be replicated in the U.K. but also across the European Union as well. In terms of next steps for the city of Bristol, there's a massive public affairs piece of work here 'cause we really think we've got something here. We're told there's $ trillions of capital out there in the world looking for models to invest in to deliver decarbonization across our cities globally.
The models don't really exist. I think we've come up with a model that the private sector can be comfortable with to deliver that in-investment in Bristol, and of course, we think across cities in the U.K. and globally. The mayor of Bristol is actually, he chairs the Core Cities U.K., and he's working with the other core cities in the UK to take a similar look at the investable energy opportunities in the U.K. It's a piece of work through an organization called UK3CI. We've identified around GBP 220 billion of investable energy opportunities across the U.K. core cities and London boroughs. He's taken that proposal to COP this year.
I'm also taking every opportunity to speak to other local authorities, to the LGA and other sort of professional bodies about this. There is massive interest out there from other cities. It's been mentioned before, but people are keeping an eye on Bristol to see how it goes. I'm also getting interest internationally as well, so the Bulgarian Energy Ministry is in touch with me about how they could replicate this model in Bulgaria. I'm going to Zagreb, Croatia in two weeks to talk about City Leap. I, you know, I wish I had the time to accept all the invitations to speak about this.
I do as much as I can, this is definitely a game changer to unlock that private sector investment that is out there that is desperately looking for ethical, renewable energy opportunities across the U.K. and globally. Anybody who wants to talk to me about this or if you're aware of localities and local government areas that are, you think might benefit from hearing firsthand about this project, then I'm more than delighted to talk to them as well. Yeah, thank you. Sorry for rambling on a bit there. Shall I come back now?
I promise, Kye, I'm not gonna read all your notes in your book here. Thank you, Kye. This was amazing to listen to, right? I mean, I'm up here to talk about numbers, but the qualitative content that we've been listening to for the last couple of hours is really, really amazing. Thank you again, everyone, for coming. I'm gonna, since I've got a speaker on my, I think I'm gonna step around here. As I mentioned in the earnings call, we wanted to start to give a little bit more color around the numbers and talk about some of our disclosures. Today I'm gonna introduce some concepts. I'm gonna talk about bridges to 2023 and 2024.
Hopefully, through some interactive Q&A after we're all wrapped up, we feel like we will have an investable kind of universe here that is that's got a little bit better education, a little bit better understanding of how we see the world of Ameresco moving forward over the next several years. I don't mean just the next two years, I mean, like, longer term. On that note, I wanna start with revenue visibility. This is a slide that you all have seen. At Q1, we went and added this green bar at the bottom here to sort of illustrate the uncontracted revenue potential of the energy assets that we have operating right now.
When we put this on the page, you know, it takes the number from, you know, $5.2 billion up to $ 6.5 billion, or sorry, $ 5.3 billion up to $6.5 billion. You know, that feels like, well, that's actually a pretty significant jump, you know. There's a lot of, lot of revenue-generating opportunity there. Well, when we took a step back and thought about, well, what is the earnings power of this business? We thought, well, it might be useful to point out this graph, another one that many of you have seen this left side here, where we talk about our energy assets and development. Well, it might be useful to illustrate the revenue generation capability of the assets that are in development.
As a reminder, when we put together this metric, Josh and I work hard with all of the business units to determine those megawatts of assets, where we feel 90%+ confident that those megawatts are gonna be placed in service. This isn't about a funnel of ideas or assets in development. This is really assets in development and construction that are further along de-risked, and we have 90% confidence they're gonna be placed in service. When you look at those, breaking out biogas, that's the renewable natural gas, 141 MW. Solar and battery, 289 MW.
If we apply the same exact assumptions that we used here on this bottom bar to those assets, then you end up with another $ 4.2 billion of revenue visibility on RNG and $ 1.5 billion of revenue visibility on solar and battery. That creates this bottom bar here coming from the assets and development, adding $5.7 billion to our revenue visibility. You get a jump from the $6.5 billion in the prior slide to over $12 billion of estimated kind of total revenue visibility. That would include assets that are in operation, contracted revenues from our project business, contracted revenues from our O&M business, and then of course, the uncontracted potential revenues from assets in operation today, as well as that kind of 90%+ confidence assets that we have in development.
When you look at this, it's sort of like, well, when we added that $1.2 billion, it looked like a really big, you know, big jump. When you put it in the context of what's in development and construction, this is a really meaningful revenue number. Again, one more reminder if I go back here. This assets in development and construction, we're talking about a three to four-year cycle of deployment where we're putting those assets into service. That's the revenue picture. Let's talk about 2023 and 2024. To start to bridge 2023, the discussion about, you know, where we were at the end of Q1 and where we need to be and what we've, you know, reaffirmed our guidance for full year 2023.
I'm gonna have to start with the revenue discussion. As I said in the earnings call, on the project revenue side, you know, we generally see 90%-95% of our 12-month contracted backlog executed during the year. In addition to that, out of our awarded backlog, the revenue each year, we're talking 10%-15% of our awarded backlog gets recognized into revenue. There's an element of proposed activity where we haven't been awarded the projects yet that turns into an award, that turns into a contract, that turns into revenue throughout the course of the year, which during the call I threw out, you know, it's like a 5%-10% range. I think we've got some pretty tight visibility on what that looks like this year for 2023.
We sort of put these ranges up here, starting with the reported Q1 revenues and then adding up the additions on the project side. When I move to the asset side, again, start with the actual, add a run rate Q2 through Q4 of those existing operating assets, and then I'm adding in the, you know, the additional added amounts. We talked about, you know, we reported 34 MW of assets being placed in service in Q1. That's the revenue generated by those assets that are already in service. I've got partial contribution from the 34 MW that we expect to place in service between Q2 through Q4 on the solar and battery side. Just a touch more granularity on the renewable natural gas.
We talked about the three plants that we expect to place in service during 2023. Excuse me. The first two are 5.2 MW each. The last one, the largest one, is 12 MW. I've included it here for reference because we've talked about three, obviously there's zeros next to that because that's expected to be placed in service toward the end of the year. The first two are, you know, one's Q2, one's Q3. We've got partial contribution, we provided ranges of revenues there. O&M and other, a little bit easier because those are effectively straight line over the course of the year. That's the kind of revenue guidance picture.
As you can see, when you sum all the numbers up, the range ends up being $1.45 billion -$1.55 billion , midpoint of $1.5 billion, precisely where we are with our guidance. I know a lot of note-taking. These materials are gonna be out there on the website. You'll be able to download the presentation and do what you will to manipulate the numbers and see how you feel about them. On the EBITDA side, this is a very busy slide, but the key point here is the best way to look at bridging EBITDA is to actually pull the allocation of corporate OpEx out of that equation. Reported Q1 adjusted EBITDA before the corporate allocation ends up being this $38.7 number total across the four business lines.
If I bridge that down to Q2 through Q4, then we're actually adding certain amounts per business line that we expect to see, right? The drivers behind these additional numbers down here to get us through to the year-end pre-allocation, number one, on the project side, the O&M side, we've got some margin improvement. In addition to that, of course, we're adding additional assets that we're placing in service, which I talked about on the revenue slide, which we'll get to the bridge. Now graphically, to show you the representation of this. Reported Q1 adjusted EBITDA before corporate OpEx, $38.7 m illion . I'm gonna add to that project revenue, $113.8 m illion that will generate between Q2 and Q4. Add to that the run rate of existing operating assets, EBITDA $73.1 m illion .
Add to that new assets being placed in service for the remainder of the year. That's $14.2 m illion . The O&M and the other, again, sort of ratable additions to EBITDA. Once that bridge is complete, we take the corporate OpEx off of that, brings us to the $215 m illion midpoint of the EBITDA guidance for 2023. I'll go back to this so people can look at it again and see the project revenue again and O&M revenue. You see there's a combination of the seasonality associated with the business. Q1 tends to be a little bit lighter than the Q2, Q3, and Q4. In addition, margin improvement, EBITDA margin improvement, is an important factor there, where you see the arrows kind of pointing to the margins for Q1 as well as Q2 through Q4.
One thing I'm just gonna jump out, and we'll make this correction in the slides, is this should read Q2 through Q4 in the title of this slide, okay? Sorry, of that column. 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance, that's how we're getting to the $215 million. Right? Moving to 2024. We put out this $300 million of adjusted EBITDA target last year at our Investor Day. I think the best way to bridge that is, well, let's start with where we're gonna end up in 2023, $215 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2023. With that as a starting point, we're gonna add a few things to bridge to the $300 million. Starting point is traditional 10% growth on the project line. That's actually not a, you know, not an unreasonable number.
That's actually quite reasonable. You know, if you work for George, you know, 10% is not the number he tells us, right? I think that's a fair assumption. The second is the 2023 assets that were placed into service. To come up with $215 million of EBITDA, as we saw in the prior slide, that only had partial year contribution from all of those assets going into service during 2023. For 2024, we will go ahead and add the incremental revenue to take those to a full 12-month run rate on EBITDA contribution. In addition to that, on the asset side, we're gonna continue to place assets in service.
There's 7.5 contribution from assets placed in service in 2024 in the PV and battery side, and then $32.9 m illion for 2024 additional assets being placed in service from the renewable natural gas business. Those are both kind of partial contributions during the year. When we're placing assets in service, obviously, they're not going to contribute a full year. Going into O&M and other, again, just straight up 10% growth, relatively conservative assumptions. $2.5 million is actually the incremental OpEx on the corporate side versus what we saw in the corporate OpEx from 2023. We subtract that back down, and we're at $300. The interesting thing about this is, you know, you see all of these different contributions, these different growth rates, right?
There's a certain amount of project revenue and asset revenue built into the 215. This is a path, right? We wanted to illustrate the path that we see with high confidence as we've talked about our process for coming up with numbers. You know, it's quite granular when we're able to look at things on a business unit by business unit basis, almost project and asset by asset basis. There are always going to be puts and takes. With the 2023 slide you saw that we put up ranges. There are always gonna be puts and takes through the course of the year that are going to adjust the numbers one way or another. The importance of having a diversified business model is that on balance, the expectation is that these numbers will carry through to meet these targets.
That's the EBITDA. Lastly, an overlay just to show you a little bit about how we build up to these numbers is the, you know, proportions. These pie charts are something that you guys see every quarter. This is a snapshot of the projected way that these pie charts will look based on the 2023 plan and the 2024 plan. You see that 2023, actually a relatively big project year, right? There's been a substantial amount of project activity. In 2024, you see the recurring O&M and asset going back up into the mid-60s, which is where it normally sits.
Again, with the puts and takes of the project business and the asset business, you have a business, you know, Ameresco has a business that's sort of effectively capable of seeing adjustments where the totals still actually ring true. Again, I'm back to this revenue guidance. I wanna talk about the path again. You see in each of these business lines. There's ranges for each one, and as I said, puts and takes. It's very important to understand the business is moving, the business is changing. We will see, you know, ups and downs across the different different categories.
At the end of the day, with so many different business lines, so many different line items, so many different technologies, so many different types of deployments, and growth engines, we expect to see, you know, where we get through the bridges to numbers that $215 m illion for 2023 and $300 m illion for 2024. I'll leave you with that.
I think at this point, as my clock runs down to 0, I'm going to turn this, turn the mic over to George, let him make some closing remarks. Thank you.
You know, the beauty of Ameresco on the particular numbers, that we have various levers that we can pull. If one particular area falls short, let's say on the asset side, we have the project side or the O&M side, so we have good flexibility. That pretty much it reduces the risk, and that's why we feel good about the numbers that we have forecasted for 2023 as well as for the 2024. I wanna thank again each and every one of you for being here and your interest in Ameresco. We are very proud of what we have accomplished so far, and we wanna serve our investors as well too. Not only ourselves, as well as our investors.
One of the things that we look when we acquire companies, when we acquire talent people, that they have the passion for this business. This is what attracts the especially the younger generation and the younger people, because we are in a climate emergency in USA, and they want to contribute. If they have the passion for this business, it fits very well with what we are trying to do. That's why you see our ESG report. We say, "Doing well by doing good." What excites me about this business, that not only I have done well for myself, but we have done very well for our customers and very well for the environment, for society in general. That inspires people to do better and do more. And that brings us together and we do better.
The other thing, paranoid about the customer. I think Steve Wood had brought the question of how do we compete in the environment? That was the first question that we asked Steve when we set up this company. "How are we gonna compete against the Johnson Controls and the Honeywell and everybody else, so much bigger companies than us?" He said, "Well, we're gonna approach the solution from the customer's perspective. What does the customer want and what do they value? That's how we're gonna compete with them. Otherwise, develop an unbiased solution for the particular customer." We say, "Great. How are we gonna do that?" By developing broader and deeper technical expertise than they have.
Otherwise, whether they want a biomass plant or a biogas or a solar plant, we will develop the expertise that we will be able to service that particular customer across the board. Earlier I mentioned the Savannah River project. They told us that customer satisfaction was one of the reasons they picked us, but the other one was, it was the final list. It was ourselves, Johnson Controls, Lockheed Martin, and Siemens. What they said at the end of the interview, they asked what they had done with other people, they hadn't built biomass plant themselves. They brought consultants. When the committee said, "Okay, if something goes wrong, who do we look for?" When it came to Ameresco, they said, "George," because we had an integrated offering. That's a great differentiator in the marketplace, being able.
Then I tell our people, "If we listen long enough to our customers, they will tell us what they want." That's why this is how we approach it. We've been right now in the United States, we have great traction. We -- It's not just Ameresco we did that, with my previous company, NORESCO. In the federal government, Ameresco is number one, NORESCO is number two. Between the two of us, we have over 50% of the market share on the federal government. My wife says once in a while, says, "You know, you created a monopoly," because the other company--
I said, "Well, let NORESCO complain once in a while." She says, "Don't complain, you created them as well." We built that kind of mentality, take care of the customer, having the people that they have the passion for this business. It's a great differentiator in the in the place, and that's why we wanna do the same thing in Europe. That's the company that we look at for, that they have the passion for this, for this particular business. We know we'll be very successful. Kye, I wanna congratulate you and Bristol City for the great work and the vision that you guys have. In order to have decarbonization, the cities and towns, the counties, the colleges, the universities, they have to get involved.
At the end of the day, all of us have to get involved in order to be able to get there. I will leave you with this. It's a great time for us. The market is expanding across the board, and it's happening. We, by design or we were lucky enough, we have developed the company to deliver that product that's needed in the marketplace right now. We have the capabilities, and we have the track record. That differentiates us than anybody else, you know. Like Britta said, these other guys, they come in, it's not their main line of business, it's not their bread and butter. They come in, they go. I worked for a utility, and we did the first energy services company in the country back in 1980, right? New management came in, they didn't want the utility.
Thank the Lord, I said, "Fine, I will buy it and go on my own." That was the best thing that's ever happened to me. That's what they do. The same with the manufacturers, they wanna push their product. This is a great opportunity for us. Again, I don't wanna keep going on. We feel good where we are, and we feel that the European community will welcome companies like us because we have the, the customer mentality, and we can bring the talent together and execute. Thank you again very much, I will be around, any questions that you might have.
Steve Panello, go ahead.
Thanks. Two things. onw, just in general, in the European business, how does that impact margins? Is it similar to the U.S. market? Are you thinking about that as a higher or lower margin opportunity given the competitive landscape?
No, it's, so far the margins, they're very similar. Either that or, because many of the customers, they're international clients, especially over the C&I, so they know what the margins are over there, they're looking for similar margins over here. Britta, you might wanna comment on it, but I haven't seen any difference. The opportunities though, with the distributed generation, they probably much have bigger here, the opportunities, and the margins might be a little bit better because the price differential or the energy prices in E.U., they're higher than what we have back in the States.
Thanks.
Two more sentences.
Okay, thanks. I guess for Doran, this, one of the topics we hear from investors is sort of the cash generation over time. Is there a way to think about if you do $300 million in EBITDA next year and you don't invest, right? Based on the assets in place, what kind of free cash the business throws off?
I'll give you the quick answer to that is, there's more to come on cash flows.
Okay.
We're currently actually spending quite a bit of time on, you know, just elements of disclosure. Today's discussion was really what I'll call the low-hanging fruit of what everyone's sort of thinking about 2023 and 2024, and wanted to give additional color on revenue visibility. Our next task is actually gonna be coming up with the proper sort of disclosure with respect to cash flows, so folks can understand that, you know, the business generates really strong cash flow. We take that cash flow, you know, little bit of maintenance CapEx that we deal with, and then we're investing it in the business, whether it's M&A, like we've seen today, you know, energy assets that we're investing in.
Coming up with a metric that gives some meaningful color to that is something that we're currently working on. More to come, Steve.
Okay, thanks. The details were very helpful.
Okay.
Can I just ask a question on the. Sorry. Thank you. I can see it's a massive addressable market. I don't have a good feel for how many big contracts come up each year. You know, you've got a good portfolio there, but it's quite a range. It's a range of institutions. It's a range of geographies. You know, within the U.K., for example, how many big Bristol-type contracts would come up this year where you'd get the whole team together, you know--
Good question. I will let the U.K. people, Britta?
Helpful. I mean, yeah. I mean, Bristol is obviously a first, and it's obviously a first, and it's very exciting. I think there is a big opportunity to replicate that, as we talked about. I mean, it's already been picked up. In the U.K., Chris Skidmore recently did a Mission Zero: Independent Review of Net Zero, and published it. Bristol City Leap featured as an example of how place-based solutions can really drive this transition. We are seeing a lot of interest. Kye mentioned he's speaking to all sorts of countries and across Europe as well as in the U.K. We've been talking to several cities as well as Ameresco in the U.K., who are interested in finding out how they can run that procurement. I think there's a lot more to come on that.
I can't talk about specific cities that we've been speaking to, but there are more to come.
I think that the, you know, the U.K. government also took a real leadership position in providing significant grant funding for decarbonization-focused projects. That really did drive a lot of activity in our marketplace, among councils who were just clamoring to get their hands on some of that cash to implement the projects that were gonna help them meet their climate action plan.
I might also add, this is Josh, we can certainly execute on these large billion-dollar type projects. We're just kinda getting over one now in the United States. We've got Bristol potential. You heard about the billions over many years there. We can execute these potential black swans. Keep in mind, Doran talked about this, I think most of us hit it at one point. We're a very diversified business. We sorta make our bread and butter on smaller projects. Our average size projects is still less than $10 million. Our average size energy asset and solar and storage size is still less than 5 MW. We don't need billion-dollar type contracts to hit our targets in the near term or even in the long term.
We continue to serve sort of these, you know, small or medium-sized customers. When the big ones come up, we certainly go after them aggressively, and I think we have a proven track record of delivering.
Sorry, I'll throw in one more thing just so you understand. We look very closely at addressable market. It has been historically focused on North America. When you look at our business mix in the United States as far as customer in Canada, we're very heavy onto the federal government, local governments, you know, municipals, universities. Here in the U.K., also very heavy on the government side. When you move to the rest of Europe, actually there's quite a bit more on the corporate and industrial side and the opportunity set there. We have--
We use a, you know, consultant in the U.S., Navigant, that does a lot of that addressable market work. We have some work to do here with a little bit of wood to chop, I'm looking at Leila, to actually come up with some meaningful information, useful information for the market to understand where Ameresco sees its addressable market. As Josh said, we're a diversified business, so we have to kind of include numbers. For us, it's not as simple as saying, you know, "Okay, the councils in the U.K. are gonna come up with, you know, X number of RFPs in, you know, 2024, right?" For example, right? It's a much more diverse and complex business for us.
We still think that the data is there, and I think that we need to do some aggregation of that data to put out some addressable market information for people. Leila.
One last thing that we just discussed in our last earnings call, and this is not U.K.-specific, but it just gives you an idea for opportunity. In Q1 this year versus Q1 last year-- We increased our proposals on the street in terms of their dollar volume by 50%. We see there's increased opportunity across all of our markets for sure, and we're seeing that play out already in this year.
Then a second question, if I can.
Sure.
Yeah, I'm no expert on the councils, but the other sort of main project that we hear about is the Energy Superhub Oxford, which I think is largely about mobility. I think today I've heard quite a bit about renewable power and some of the other technologies and battery storage. Is mobility and transport an area that you can be involved in as well?
Mark, you wanna go first?
Yeah. Let me speak first. We're absolutely getting involved with the rollout of EV infrastructure, and you may be aware of the new LEVI fund, which is government-based grant funding to part-fund a lot of that rollout within the U.K. We're helping Bristol and West England Combined Authority bid for a reasonable sum of that money, and we can roll out those implementations. As part of Bristol City Leap, Bristol Council already have a network of EV chargers, for example, in Bristol, but that's very replicable. In energy infrastructure, it's right within our wheelhouse.
Yeah. We're also being supported with the fleet renewal as well, with your expertise. It's, yeah, it's not just infrastructure, it's also procurements like that.
Great. Sorry, I thought you were finished. One last thing I'll add real fast is we, gosh, it was now almost two years ago, we added a fantastic EV expert to our team, back to our corporate team, who's a resource for all of our teams. He's really looking at large, EV opportunities in terms of, overall EV infrastructure and how we can add them on to a lot of the projects that we're working.
We're also assisting National Highways right now, with their battery energy storage and EV infrastructure efforts, across the country.
Yeah, no, you're right. We're working at seven motorway service stations right now to unlock the really rapid EV charging and putting in containerized battery solutions.
It's what I said earlier, we listen to the customer. The other aspect of our business in order to be successful, listen to the market. We branded the company as a cleantech integrator. As the technologies evolve, we will evolve with the company. Many of the energy services companies during COVID, they didn't do very well. We kept growing even during COVID because we adapted better than other companies, and we pivoted a little bit into some of these newer technologies that the customers were looking for. You will see us, like we brought the X. We were one of the first companies to do the renewable natural gas in the United States back in 2010. We built the first, and now everybody is into it. We're one of the first companies to start integrating the microgrids, especially over the bases.
We did the first base we did, was up at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard with, to maintain the nuclear submarines. They wanted to make sure they have resiliency. We have a combined heat and power battery energy storage, and the microgrid has been operating for the last 5 years now. They had all kinds of storms, and the only area that had electricity was the naval shipyard. What we do in the company, and I have told some of the groups, we invest some money to be a little bit incubators. Some of these emerging technologies, we invest a little bit money, we learn a lot, like battery energy storage.
We tackle these large projects, but we have done probably a dozen of smaller facilities, and that's why we have the technical expertise and the construction management expertise in order to be able to execute some of those projects. That's. You will see us evolve as hydrogen, for example. We're working on a small pilot program right now. Because when you take the landfill gas and we do the renewable natural gas, we are about 60% of d elivering hydro-hydrogen. You will see us pivot into that as well. Because the beauty in this market, the technologies are changing so fast and the economics of those technologies is coming down. The economic. They pencil out, they make good economic sense.
Right. Thank you. May I ask a question about funding? You mentioned a lot about European policy. There's a lot of maybe pushback in accessing these public fundings. Could you give us more color about, you know, the hurdles, in the process and the approvals in getting money from the European Union or any subsidies that you may have here in the U.K.? Now if I could follow up on that also on funding in general, have you ever seen-- You're dealing of course, with, local authorities, you know, small entities. Given your exposure in the United States, regional banking crisis and so on, increase of spreads, there are some you're also seeing issues, here in Europe. Thank you.
I'll start if I could.
Yes.
I'll work backwards. The funding environment in the United States, I think the headlines may be worse than at least are affecting. Do you want me up front?
Come up front.
I don't wanna be alone up there. Okay. I think I like statistics, of course, I'm in the finance group, so rather than give you anecdotes, I'll give you statistics. At the end of Q1, we closed, I think $172 million worth of financings. That was after the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in the United States. Between, as subsequent events, these are in our 10-Q that was published a week or two ago. Between the end of March and the end of April, we closed over, I think it was $210 million additional U.S. dollars worth of financing. As a company and, as an industry, we still have very, very strong access to capital. I'm gonna be a little bit selfish here.
I think I'd be curious to hear from either Enrico or Giorgio about Italian funding opportunities. Then maybe we'll move it over to Konstantinos for sort of other international funding opportunities, access to capital, or access to public funding. Maybe we'll start with Giorgio.
Enrico's over here.
No, right up front. Yeah, we all have to manage.
There are a lot of funding. I mean, we have to divide the business in two. The one that is the funding is what is called tax credit.
Now we all have to.
On the buildings, maybe that you heard this famous 110% bonus we had during the last two years, will continue in 2023 for the old buildings, the efficiency of the old buildings. The other part of the possible funding, I mean, could be also on the RNG. I mean, up to now, we have not done very much because I mean, the Enerqos was a PMI, a small company, so less than $50 million revenue. We will have the thanks to the Ameresco access to the possibility to acquire business in that sector. You want to add something, Enrico?
Come in. Come in front.
Yes. I mean, for us, I mean the funding, scenario is significantly improved after being entered in the Ameresco Group, of course, no? That as Giorgio was saying. In terms of building new projects, we have this actual also capability to provide guarantee to our customers. This significantly improved in the last month, two months. About government funding, as you know, Italy is a huge package of Recovery Plan that, at the moment, has not been fully deployed because there were no opportunities, no opportunities consumed of that funding. Our mission is to create opportunities in also in biogas, that is a dedicated funding line, but also retrofitting of buildings. Even hydrogen has a huge bucket of Recovery Plan funding.
I say that our mission is to create opportunity and being executed on this funding also that at the moment there is more funding than opportunities that could be implemented, you know. The even for authorization progress and permitting time, I mean, there's a really demand of capability of companies capable to put to on the ground those opportunities.
Before I turn it over to Konstantinos, sorry, I just also wanted to point out that most of what this company does is not required, does not require any government subsidies at all. It's we're replacing old aging infrastructure with newer, more efficient age infrastructure, and the savings more than pay for the capital upgrades. As Commissioner Dodd was saying, there's a significant opportunity where even if there isn't public funding available, there's billions, trillions, whatever the number is of private capital that we can access to do these public infrastructure projects. Again, where the savings pay for the work that we do. Sorry. Just wanted to point that out.
Well, that's, we see the governing grade--
I think he's got a mic.
Funding is available from banks. We have RF mechanism that supports the long-term financing. Because of the increase of the interest rates. Of course, with the support of Ameresco, funding has become much easier. We don't expect that this should be a problem for the future. Banks are trying to support all the ESG targets of the companies. I think we're in the right sector in the right time.
I might also add that as changes have happened geopolitically, it's driven energy prices up pretty dramatically, pretty quickly, and that has just, as Josh was talking about, made the overall payback of the improvements that we implement for customers even that much more compelling. You know, without the need for additional
Sophie. Let's get the mic to her.
Thank you. First question to George. How do you think about the right size of Europe versus the U.S. for the business? I mean, the opportunity in Europe is big. I think probably in the US it's even bigger. As you say, you know, if a client wants to speak to somebody about a problem, which hopefully doesn't arise, they want to speak to George in the end. How do you balance the size, the number of countries and how much time and capital you want to commit in Europe versus the U.S.?
Well, that's why I said earlier, you know, we will grow, but in a measured way. That's why we want to acquire companies in E.U., especially the countries that we have targeted, and we'll expand. That doesn't mean we've just identified the countries that we have targeted right now. We have the capability, even in the United States right now, we are not short of manpower in order to cover that market. In E.U., we have to get more talent, and we have to get more companies, better footprint than we have. It's gonna take some time. On the other hand, though, the opportunity is there. I don't know if anybody wants to add to all that.
I was gonna say, you know, one of the criteria we talked about when we were doing the M&A panel about strong management teams. It's critically important, right? What we've seen so far in the, on the stage with me today is, you know, some really strong management teams, and it's critically important. We, you know, with the measured approach to growth, we are going to remain a flat organization. Just that's never gonna change, right? I think that's so, you know, the senior executives across the company are gonna continue to be front and center with the customers so that, you know, there's, you know, there is that person they've got direct, you know, direct contact with if there's an issue. If it's not George, it's me, or it's Britta, or it's whomever else it's gonna be. I think it's, you know, it's a critical element, just making sure that we're right in front of the customer.
Yeah. The other thing, finding people, you know, that they have the passion for this business because the climate change is such a hot issue. There are people out there. It just takes a little bit passion and follow through, we will find them. That's it. Yeah.
Just a quick one for Doran, just on the EBITDA bridge for the year. Just the margin improvement in projects and O&M for the rest of the year versus Q1, is that just a normal seasonality, or is it something in the mix of the projects as well?
It's seasonality and mix. Both, right? I think the seasonality impacts the EBITDA margins because of the OpEx, the kind of way that OpEx rolls over the course of the year. In addition to that, we've got higher margin stuff coming into the mix later in the year that also contributes to that increase.
Thank you.
Absolutely. There we go.
Thank you. Sorry, just a kind of bigger picture question, really. Thinking about the balance between projects and the assets and then smaller and larger kind of projects that you do, you talked a lot today about your heritage being in smaller projects and energy efficiency. Clearly you're growing your assets, and it appears to be higher margin there. What's Ameresco look like in kind of 5 to 10 years? Do you continue to grow larger and larger kind of assets on your book? Do you look more like a utility in kind of 5 to 10 years, or do you think the sweet spot remains in doing more smaller projects?
Go ahead.
Oh, sorry. Yeah. George, I'm sure, has plenty to say on that. I wouldn't use the term utility. There is kind of an IPP element to it as you become a larger and larger asset owner. I think that as you've seen from our existing asset portfolio, we're gonna continue to be more diversified in terms of asset types that we own. Like, I think that we do expect in the U.S., certainly, there's gonna be continued opportunities for energy as a service that'll be an asset on the balance sheet. We'll continue to invest cash into additional assets as we continue to grow. That's certainly represented by the, you know, the new slide where I kind of showed the new green bar of revenue potential from those assets.
That being said, I don't think that we're, you know, we're never gonna really back away from the project business. The project business, feeds that asset business, not only just feed it the cash to actually invest in those assets, but also the exposure to technologies, our ability to pilot projects for customers, to learn new technologies, that instead of kind of blindly going in and putting things on our balance sheet and learn that way. Now we're actually, we're actually doing projects for customers and learning through the project business, how these things work. I think the project business will continue to be important. From a size perspective, there's always gonna be a mix. I think what we found, and we certainly found with the SoCal Ed project in California, was that there is a tremendous amount of operating leverage associated with doing large projects.
The dollars of gross profit that we can contribute down to our bottom line is quite substantial because there is no corresponding increase in our running OpEx to take on those larger projects. When we look at the business that we're, you know, that we're pitching with Sunel, you know, large utility scale projects that are solar plus potential for battery, those, especially in a JV context, the operating leverage of that is fantastic.
The project business will keep growing and probably grow at a very good, faster rate, pace down the road. It's a bread and butter, and we use the cash flow generated from that particular bit for the project business to invest it in assets. We grow. That's why it's a measure, grow on the assets that we put in our balance sheet every year, because we wanna generate our own cash rather than going to market and raise more equity or whatever, something else. That's. The same with the O&M. The O&M is behind the project business. It's a good recurring line of business, good margin, better than the project, and it doesn't require any capital.
The other thing, looking at Kye, you know, we wanna be in the sustainability world and help the cities and towns, they need the project business as well as the assets. Ultimately that's where we're going. We wanna be that agent that brings those cities and towns to 100% carbon neutral. I guess no more questions. Thank you very much, all. We'll still be around to answer any questions. I'm gonna take a bio break, though.
We have lunch. For everyone who can stay, we have lunch in the other room. We're hoping that you can stay, enjoy some lunch, ask all your hard questions to Josh, and spend some time with our people. We would love that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody.