Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this call about Bentley Systems' agreement to acquire Power Line Systems. I'm Carey Mann, Bentley's VP of Investor Relations. On the webcast today, we have Bentley Systems' Chief Executive Officer, Greg Bentley, and Chief Financial Officer, David Hollister. Before we begin, allow me to provide a disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements.
This webcast, including the question-and-answer period of the webcast, contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding the planned acquisition of Power Line Systems and the timing thereof, the impact of the acquisition on Bentley's financial conditions and results of operations, and the products and services and business relationship of each of Bentley and Power Line Systems. Any statements made in this presentation that are not statements of historical fact, including statements about our beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements and should be evaluated as such. Greg and David will begin with an overview, and then we'll take your questions. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg.
Carey, thank you. Thanks to each of you for your interest in our announcement today. Of course, in what we do, our economy and our environment are underlaid by infrastructure engineering, and of course, by going digital through our offerings at Bentley Systems. That's where we're positioned, if you like, at the convergence of our economy and our environment. That's true as well of our announcement today because this propels us to the forefront of what is the most robust and potentially rewarding infrastructure engineering challenge today and for the long term. That is the improving the capacity and quality and resilience of our power transmission infrastructure by going digital for what I call grid integration.
It's in a sweet spot for us at Bentley Systems, among our footprint, if you like, in particular, our mainstay in public works and utilities. You could call that horizontal infrastructure of networks, if you like. We've had just one gap in that respect. Let me describe how Power Line Systems fills that gap. Just a reminder, our comprehensiveness is our competitive differentiating advantage, and I'm gonna describe that the Power Line Systems acquisition will enable us to grow faster in five ways, but including in all these dimensions of comprehensiveness. Who's Power Line Systems? They got started just as we did in 1984.
Although Bentley Systems would extensively develop a portfolio and a platform across infrastructure, Power Line Systems specialized, and in particular, on the very interesting structural problem for power transmission structures and the connected cables, the conductors that are themselves structural members, if you like. That's a very interesting and challenging problem to which Dr. Alain Peyrot at the University of Wisconsin brought a finite element analysis approach, and that has sort of uniquely suited the particular specialized problem of power transmission engineering structures and lines. The company has very assiduously applied itself to better and better modeling and simulation over time to more completely and perfectly handle that problem in infrastructure engineering. Along the way, Eric Jacobson, the CTO, and Otto Lynch, the CEO, joined.
In 2018, founding family members retired, and TA's investment and the company since then has transitioned its business model to pure subscription and continued development of the specialized products. The essence is still called PLS-CADD of 3D engineering has been necessary from the outset to solve this interesting problem. The challenges of the sag and tension and risks of the cables are a very interesting aspect of it. Power Line Systems has contributed to and complied with and helped develop set standards across the world for safety and performance of power transmission structures. You start with a terrain model in transmission design, a structural model, I've mentioned, but of course, drawings are also needed. That's the other D at the end of the product description, and that's been long automated.
A substantial advantage is the industrialization, if you like, with the manufacturer's libraries, needed for power transmission engineering. It's a great example of the potential in more specialized software for particular, engineering, infrastructure engineering disciplines. The breakdown of Power Line Systems business looks like Bentley Systems, which if you like, in their case, the engineering firms on the right, and then various categories of owners or construction, on the left.
But here, if we look at the geographic breakdown of Power Line Systems business, it doesn't look like, Bentley Systems or that of the potential being, in this case, very much concentrated to start with in North America. With sufficient, proven installations elsewhere throughout the world and investment in the standards and codes required everywhere, to suggest that there could be a significant incremental geographic opportunity, which I'll talk about.
Let's go back to what we might mean by the grid integration opportunity. Power Line Systems caters for the engineering of the transmission structures, which you see here, in blue, and they're towers and in some cases, poles, carrying the higher voltages. At Bentley Systems, our business in the electric grid is through our OpenUtilities Designer for, if you like, network provisioning and our OpenUtilities Substation product, both on the distribution side.
This is the lower voltage local networks that we're all familiar with at, in our neighborhoods. Then we acquired this year the SPIDA analysis product for distribution structure and wire combinations. That has been our footprint. Clearly now to put together the transmission engineering with distribution engineering is the beginning of an opportunity for grid integration for the electric network.
This business alone, the Power Line Systems business on its own, would grow substantially faster going forward because of the developments we're all familiar with. I might say, I haven't gone out of the way here to quote lots of investment figures because I think each of your firms very likely is researching this very opportunity in the energy transition, but just a representative aspect of it.
These are among our Going Digital Awards finalists, and of course, we'll announce the winners in the beginning of December. Each of the finalists has been presenting for independent juries and any of you with interest in that. 13% of the finalists, I think that's representative of the proportion of work of infrastructure engineers in the world that's on new renewable sources of generation.
When they are sources of centralized generation, of course, they're not useful until the power transmission grid finds its way to take advantage of the new generation capacity, the new green generation capacity from renewables. On the consumption side, we, in electrifying everything, of course, power has to be distributed for electric charging of vehicles and so forth. On all parts of the grid, the capacity needs to be increased, and the aspect of where the network is and fortifying it is the significant priority.
Another way to look at this, just among the transmission lines, and looking at the U.S. as an example, here's an estimate that the 600,000 mi of transmission lines we have now will need for zero carbon accomplishments to be 6 x that scale of transmission lines over these next 30 years. I want to talk now about four other dimensions of faster growth that grid integration will enable us by virtue of this acquisition. Let's start with the geographic dimension of our comprehensiveness. Those 600,000 mi of transmission lines now in the U.S. are among 4.7 million km of transmission lines across the world. Here is one estimate of the transmission and distribution spending currently by region.
You see the U.S., where the bulk of Power Line Systems business is far from the bulk of such spending in the world, which especially is significant in opportunities in Asia and new commitments and requirements for this spending for the energy transition in Europe and elsewhere. These happen to be, this year, the finalists for the Year in Infrastructure Going Digital Awards in 2021 in the utilities and communications category. The juries have picked three projects for their going digital virtuosity that happen to signify this international opportunity. One is in Malaysia. One is in London, which shows power distribution tunnels underground, which I'm going to come back to. By the way, they are three meters in diameter and 60 meters below the ground in that infrastructure project.
In China, a very interesting, photovoltaic, solar power project, which uses a mountain hillside, that didn't have any other purpose and involved practically every one of our products to engineer that with the correct orientation of the panels, for instance. The substation aspect of this, for instance, was engineered with our OpenUtilities Substation. We do actually rather well in China with our, grid products historically. Suggesting that there's a further opportunity there for the, PLS products. Let's turn now in the direction of the infrastructure life cycle opportunity, the biggest opportunity of all for us at Bentley Systems in comprehensiveness. The opportunity for infrastructure engineers is for their modeling and simulation work to continue to be used not only through project delivery, but especially in the asset performance life cycle, of, infrastructure assets.
Through a cloud service, a digital twin cloud service, we can facilitate that without anyone needing to change the way they're working now, to extend the value and evergreen digital twins become possible. My example of this is our OpenTower product. OpenTower Designer is for the structural design of communication towers. Note, this is not a transmission tower. It's not for conductor wires. We created this product by request from the communication tower owners, and they helped us with this over the past several years. It's important because each time they add equipment to a communication tower, which they need continuously to do, they need to resimulate the engineering modeling, especially for the structural aspect. What is new is the lifetime opportunity for a digital twin cloud service we call OpenTower iQ.
You've heard me talk about it before. We announced in March, bringing together the reality modeling and the machine learning, and it works like this for an existing communication tower. UAV repeatedly surveys. It remembers the program they used to survey it. They use the same flight path to repeatedly survey it. Our reality modeling processes that into a reality mesh, which is an as-operated 3D model. You can see you can get to any level, even millimeter accuracy, depending on how many overlapping photographs are processed through our software. Then machine learning is used to recognize the equipment and, for instance, to look for corrosion.
If you like, you're starting in the case of such a communication tower opportunity with an engineering model supplemented by the operational technology, if you like, the imagery and IoT sensors for an evergreen digital chronology, if you like, over the life cycle of that tower asset. This life cycle opportunity that occurs to us is interesting and relevant to transmission towers as well as they age and deteriorate and corrode and of course are prone and vulnerable to vegetation encroachment and so forth. That's the life cycle opportunity. Let's talk about an opportunity across, if you like, the dis- the disciplines beyond transmission engineering. Here's a look at the U.S. electric grid by numbers, and you see the significance of transmission structures in mi.
Distribution, the local, lower voltage networks, are hugely more in number, and extent, as you see here, including the substations. In fact, recall the scale of transmission. The scale of distribution opportunity in terms of infrastructure reach, and a grid integration potential is an order of magnitude greater. You may have seen me use this slide before. This describes our own history at Bentley Systems, where we started with computer-aided design products, and modeling and simulation and reality. All of these used together. CAD and GIS have been continued to advance through this notion of 4D digital twins. This is a picture of the opportunity in distribution modeling, actually, because unlike transmission, in distribution, there are a myriad of different approaches used by the utilities in the world and their contractors.
Many still use MicroStation, still use 2D drawings, might use some 3D. In a lot of cases, it's GIS, but just a notional, not an engineering representation of the distribution structures and risks. Of course, there's opportunities in the 4D construction modeling and asset performance. But it is a land of opportunity where there is not yet a standard 4D digital twin approach. What I think can occur in the distribution network is that the reality modeling, the drone surveying, is getting so much better from moving vehicles and USVs to UAVs to capture the distribution assets, that those can become as-operated 3D models to which can be applied the modeling and simulation needed to continue to make that distribution grid resilient and safe.
The situation now is that often the organizations maintaining the distribution grid, when they roll a truck out to where there's a problem, they discover that what's the reality on-site doesn't correspond to what their systems of record, might be a GIS system, thought or captured. They don't have a way of capturing the actual condition that exists to improve their model. Instead, they have to go back, request a survey crew to come out and ultimately improve the system of record. There's lots and lots of opportunity in distribution networks for 4D digital twins, and I believe that will be the biggest opportunity accelerated in this grid integration potential. Let's go across sectors, if you like, from electric to communications.
There always has been joint use of distribution assets, the poles in front of your house to carry communication wire lines, dial tone along with power. But communication towers in the future don't only look like this. With the 5G opportunity, there need to be very localized antenna devices such as these, and the existing distribution network is very much a candidate for more of this interesting joint use and the opportunity for grid integration here. It's also the case that the communication network will use structures that don't look like traditional towers that are on rooftops and so forth, and our grid integration approach will help us put that all together. This is what the grid integration looks like, more so going forward.
Our OpenComms network provisioning environment will be part of our grid integration opportunity here, putting this all together. Putting it together, if you like, is to address the hazards and resilience threats that have been all important over the past year, for instance, and will be more important going forward. If you like, if there could be visibility across an integrated grid, and cloud services and private clouds for this secure infrastructure can help with this in ways that I'd like to describe here. It happens that we're the proprietors of, if you like, 4D vegetation digital twins. These plants grow when, for instance, NVIDIA Omniverse is using them to create the 4D visualization of infrastructure scenes. Of course, growing trees are threats for wildfires and performance of grid networks.
To talk about grid digital twins, here are three examples. First here, we say a quality service, where, bringing into the OpenUtilities digital twin, the existing network models can show where there are problems and inconsistencies in the data. When a digital twin is introduced, that's the first thing, it takes advantage of the engineering data in ways that wasn't before possible, but shows where there are problems, and we can now use rules and machine learning to improve the data. Go on to my next example, if I can. All right. Distributed energy resources, DER, describes the proliferation of renewables behind the meter, if you like. When we do that, to hook up to the grid, the energy utility needs to simulate the capacity, in this case, of the distribution network.
We work with the Siemens SINCAL analysis engine, which is the best one for electricity that flows in both directions, so that the digital twin can be used to obtain approval and online in real time accelerate the renewable attachment to the grid. Here is a substation in which the digital twin shows the replacement of an existing, perhaps that's a transformer, and relating that to the operating manual, if you like, and the asset performance history and potential in that actual reality modeled digital twin of the substation. Speaking of substation, Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E in California, has been a adopter of our—these approaches for reality modeling and now for construction 4D modeling of their substations, and is a nominee this year as well.
I bring PG&E to your attention because, of course, it's important to help them with grid performance. In particular, PG&E announced this summer that they're going to place 10,000 mi of their transmission lines underground. While then they won't be modeled in PLS, it's a good opportunity for us at Bentley Systems. Subsurface utilities design and analysis is important across many of our infrastructure disciplines and applications, as in that example of London earlier, and that continues to be a good opportunity for us. Altogether, I describe this acquisition, this pending acquisition as perhaps the ultimate ESDG, we say for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, investment on our part, and will lead immediately to faster growth and better business along with better environmental outcomes and these sustainable development goals.
Of course, this coincides with the world consensus to focus in particular on this transmission grid bottleneck in going green and decarbonizing in the world. Goldman Sachs estimate of the expenditure that will be needed to accomplish the generally agreed goals include it runs to $6 trillion per year. But in particular, that aspect of it, which has to do with this great integration I'm talking about and will help grow the proportion that represents of our business at Bentley Systems, is the proportion shown here. The broadband infrastructure comms investment in those networks is likewise significant.
Here in the U.S., we have now in the law and the immediate opportunity, in the case of our own Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a substantial portion of the funding for, energy grid and grid resilience, along with the portion for, increased, broadband reach, will likewise, start now for new opportunities for us. In transmission, in particular, points out, not only is there funding, but also a new authority to remove some of the regulatory bottlenecks to get this new work underway. I'd like to ask David Hollister to talk about the financial aspects of the transaction announced today. Over to you, Dave.
Thanks, Greg. I have just a few points to add about the transaction. Firstly, the PLS purchase price is approximately $700 million. The deal structure enables us a tax deductible step up in basis, which we've net present valued at $90 million worth of value to us. This valuation is consistent with recent relevant comparable transaction benchmarks, and it's in line with valuation multiples of peers in our industry. We retain the option to close the transaction fully with cash, which we can accommodate with our capacity on our revolving credit facility. We can close the transaction with a mix of cash and up to 50% of the consideration in shares, again, at our option, which will be determined at closing.
We're evaluating each of these options along with other financing alternatives, including a potential equity issuance. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year, and of course, is subject to the customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Assuming we do close by the end of this year, we expect PLS to add approximately $30 million of subscription revenues to our fiscal year 2022 results, and that it will be slightly accretive to our normal business performance growth rates for ARR and thus revenues. Of particular note, I share that PLS has adjusted EBITDA margins that are more than twice that of Bentley Systems.
Net of the $90 million of tax value in this deal, the purchase price multiple on EBITDA for PLS is slightly more favorable for us relative to their multiple on our recent Seequent acquisition, reflective of Seequent having a faster growth rate. Our PLS and grid team will take that as a challenge, and we'll get to work in harvesting the synergies that Greg has discussed, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities with our existing adjacent activities and by adding the multiplier effect of introducing a globally distributed sales force and corresponding ambitious marketing. The results of all that, of course, will be added to the numbers I've shared. Carey, I think we can take some questions.
All right. Let's start with Matt Broome from Mizuho.
All right. Thanks very much, and congratulations on the announcement. I guess my first question, you know, in the press release, it was mentioned there was no sort of full-time go-to-market staffing at PLS. Presumably you intend to sort of ramp up that side of the business quite significantly. On that, you know, is this a technology that will take sort of, you know, time to evangelize, or is there an opportunity to sort of, you know, quickly scale up those go-to-market efforts and sort of rapidly accelerate adoption?
Well, the most significant acceleration that's upon us is the increase in the busyness of transmission engineers in the world. We can't create new transmission engineers very quickly. All this work is done by professional engineers, and they need qualifications and so forth. Making them more productive, the ones that aren't already using PLS-CADD is the opportunity. That is largely an opportunity, especially outside the U.S. Now, Power Line Systems has had some agents in the world who are not, I think, full-time quite themselves. They're also transmission engineering organizations. In general, we have relationships with these engineering organizations and utilities elsewhere in the world, and that will help. I wanna go back to no full-time resources in go-to-market.
It isn't that Power Line Systems isn't excellent about going to market in the community of transmission engineers. It's that if you look at the whole organization, it's a tremendous lean organization. What an accomplishment to have served so many so well, with so few people. In the whole of the organization chart, I think I see only two people who are not themselves engineers. Now, they could be software engineers or transmission engineers. They're all involved in going to market and selling because they're fellow engineers, if you like. I don't know, I think there's still some skepticism that overhead fluff people like me and people in our company can help them a lot.
We believe we can, especially in the enterprise opportunities, to go broader in the life cycle and with digital twins and in distribution and communications. It is a tremendously efficient organization, really an example to us of what can be. You know, you don't have to give up specialization in order to have a broad portfolio on a platform, and we'll, I think, be able to have the advantages of both. We're organizing Power Line Systems into our acceleration group, which is where we had the skunkworks that started to create the OpenPower activity so that they'll continue to be entrepreneurial in terms of this product integration potential I described, but at the same time, we'll be able to have a relationship sales force, Chip Energy suggested in that.
Great. Thanks for that, Greg. Does the financial guidance that you provided for PLS for next year assume any benefit from the infrastructure bill?
No, not really.
Okay.
We're being a little approximate about it because they've gone through a transition to subscription over the last three years, and there's six over 16. There's complicated accounting for it and so forth when it comes down to revenues. The usage is growing well. That usage should inflect upward, but we don't quite purport to understand that connection quite well enough yet. We'll all be paying attention to how it's on one hand, how the expenditures start to flow. Transition projects need to be approved. They take a long time to be approved. The point of the legislation is not only to help with financing them, but to get them going sooner in the U.S. I say the opportunities elsewhere in the world, we'll start on that right upon closing.
Okay. That makes sense. Maybe just one last one from me. Just could you maybe talk about how much subscription revenue PLS is expected to make this year?
The closing will occur toward the end of the year, I think.
Okay.
There is the HSR waiting period ahead now.
I see. I suppose from your comments, it sounds like Bentley's sort of company-wide rate. Is that correct?
Yeah. Strip out the, you know, the burst in our ARR and revenue growth that we got from the Seequent acquisition from that, and get to the underlying business performance, if you will. It's we expect it to be slightly stronger than that.
All right. Perfect. Thanks. Thanks again, and congratulations once again.
All right. We'll next go to Gal Munda from Berenberg.
Hello. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Good to see you, Greg and David. Just the first one on the market opportunity itself and trying to understand, it's a huge market, obviously, talking about the spend of $100+ billion on the power infrastructure today just in the U.S. itself. It looks like the PLS really is one of the market leaders in this space. Over 37 years, they've managed to get to $30 million of ARR.
What is the reason for that low digitization of the industry, and what are some of the things that will change in the future? What are they replacing? What you can help in order to increase the digitization of that process in order to kind of lift the spend for the amount of spend on software for the amount of total infrastructure spend that it is? If that makes sense.
Gal, yes. The overall T&D market, we say, electric power market, on the grid consists of the transmission and the distribution, and the pictures are different in each. In transmission, this specialized work is done only by transmission professional engineers. I would say in the U.S., it's rather high, the rate of taking advantage of 3D, not yet 4D modeling. In the world at large, less so. But the distribution, even larger spend is completely different. That is an assortment of approaches, including manual and 2D and so forth. It's not done by professional engineers typically. It's engineers, if you like, but there is not a consistent approach to that.
That is perhaps even the larger market opportunity in this grid integration I'm describing because the sophistication that PLS products bring to the interaction of the structure, even a distribution structure and the wires and cables and conduits and so forth, the 5G structure that's going to be on there and so forth, that all is very applicable and very valuable.
It just doesn't correspond to the way the workflow is done now with such reliance on that last mi of distribution when everyone has electricity going in both directions and the more intensive loading for electrification of everything, including our vehicle charging, is gonna require a greater level of performance of that distribution network. I think applying the sophistication that already PLS brings to transmission in distribution is the largest opportunity of all. That's not next year. That's a gradual opportunity over the foreseeable future.
I guess the other way to word it is the opportunity is there on the transmission, and there's a lot of CapEx that's going to be spent also because of incremental. We said probably around $73 billion for the infrastructure build just in the U.S. But the owner/operator side, which is also really important today, does not include that software spend. That's where really you can go to market together with your tools, which you already have.
Well, I'm just reacting to the term owner/operator. Both transmission and distribution are owned by owner/operators.
I mean, the spend comes more from the owner/operator than engineering companies. That's what I'm saying.
On distribution, that's certainly the case.
Yeah.
There is a tendency to outsource the engineering of distribution as well as transmission. I just want to go back to transmission. The opportunity is the increase in activity and going global. In distribution, the opportunity is introducing the sophistication of 3D and 4D modeling, which I think can be accelerated by the reality modeling of the existing distribution network, so that there are as-operated engineering-ready 3D models that will kickstart necessarily that opportunity in distribution.
Perfect. Just touching on that, opportunity on the existing, let's say, you know, the existing level of investment kind of carries on, but we did have the infrastructure bill signed this week. If we think about the incrementals, it is what you mentioned there. Do you believe the opportunity is equal between the high-speed broadband and the power network? We're talking about incremental $130 billion or so of spend.
Yes. That sounds right in terms of dollars. I think, Gal, what we all have to say here in the U.S. is we haven't had legislation like that. We haven't had funding like that. We haven't had federal programs like that, especially for grid infrastructure in either case. We don't know, we don't have experience to relate to in how the projects start, because often approvals are the slow part of it. The intention here, you know, it's really pretty urgent because all of the investment going into renewables isn't gonna help if the renewable central generation sources aren't connected to the grid. It's pretty urgent and pretty essential.
You know, we sort of can't believe it would be spelled out that to have renewable generation capacity when you can't get it to the grid, that investment is necessary and will occur. It's not as if we can look to a pattern or a template in the past to the case of that. It is. The reason I'm particularly confident about it is the renewable investment is occurring not only from government, but private sources, and it will get hooked up to the grid. That requires a special amount of grid capacity. Storage is another very essential aspect of the integrated grid opportunity and this modeling of those resources as well.
Generally, when it's renewables and it's intermittent, you need yet more capacity, if you see what I mean. It's all pointing in the right direction, but I don't act as if we're knowledgeable enough to meter out the pace of the increased work.
Thank you so much, Greg. I just appreciate it.
Yes. If everybody could, please limit themselves to one question, one follow-up, we appreciate it. We'll next go to Jason Celino at KeyBanc.
All yours, Jason. Yep. Oh, but you're muted, I think. Carey, can you unmute Jason?
Why don't we go to Joe Vruwink, and we'll come from there, and we'll come back to Jason.
Okay.
Great. Hi, everyone. First, I just have to say, only good things come from Madison, Wisconsin. You all see me starting from a good spot. I just wanted to go back to the last kind of where you just finished off because these transmission projects typically are known for long time frames, you know, 24-month commissioning time frames. Is it your sense that just given the impetus from the infrastructure build that we're gonna see a shortening of typical project timelines?
Well, I think that's the purpose of the new authority. Now, I have the same American Yankee skepticism you do of new bureaucracy, but it is meant to cut the red tape and get that grid fortification and intensification right underway.
Okay, you know, Bentley Systems this year has done a lot of work and advocacy across all the different subsectors just talking about readiness to embrace digital twins. This maybe seems like one subsector that could be on the earlier edge, you know, just thinking about the assessment work that typically gets done. There is this repository of information, you know, lidar detail and a lot that can be fed in to build a really high-fidelity model. Where would you kind of put utilities, and maybe the answer is different for transmission versus distribution, but this specific customer group in terms of readiness to embrace digital twins out of your broader public works exposure?
Great question, Joe. I have brought this communication tower example to everyone's attention because you heard me say in the Q3 operating results, in the Q3 , we gained multiple millions of dollars of ARR in communication tower digital twins. That's, you know, per tower per year is the ARR model for that. Those are specialized TowerCos . That's all they do is own and, you know, populate and increase revenues from these communication tower. I think we can expect them to be on the forefront. What they have done is enabled us to prove, here I'm showing a UAV circling a tower, you know, the viability of the digital twin concept, where you do the regular drone flights and no one has to climb the tower, you don't have to send a truck out there.
You do the machine learning, the 5G tracking of the corrosion and so forth, the inventorying. It could be applied easily to transmission towers. Now, the transmission towers don't have lots of equipment that you need to keep changing, I guess, but they are subject to vegetation encroachment, and they're fatiguing and aging and so forth. It's some conjecture on our part, but certainly you consider the stresses these power utilities are under with weather extremes and climate-driven, you know, modeling of the cable.
They freeze and the greater capacity makes them heat up and blow around and the insulators. That hopefully you'll find to be a receptive opportunity. Certainly, in our iTwin Ventures fund, we see lots of startup companies working on that problem, and we want in our ecosystem to embrace them, help them bring specialized approaches to what our iTwin platform can underlie provide.
Thank you very much.
I'll go to Kash Rangan, Goldman.
Thank you very much.
Ooh, Kash, you got muted.
Oh, I got muted.
Oh, now we hear you, Kash. Go ahead.
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for the perspective on the industry. Curious to get your take on how much of the existing infrastructure has been designed using software so as to calculate the penetration rate. Also, what do you see as impetus for change in the design of these systems going forward, whereby it would necessitate the use of PLS software? Because the layman impression would be that these are these big poles standing out there. They're around for decades, and nothing really has happened. Help us disabuse that notion as to what.
Well-
What is the change going ahead? Thank you.
Kash, let me start with transmission. Of course, those are the high voltage structures. I would say most in the U.S. most transmission engineers in the U.S. have access to PLS products. I don't know that that's true of the population of transmission structures, 'cause some of them are very old. But the reason that take-up will quickly increase is the global opportunity especially. And that's not a matter of displacing competitive products. The reason it's important is you have to be a transmission line engineer to do this work, and they're all gonna be very much busier.
Those who have somehow been able not to have this very most productive tool will now need to have it in order to get their work done, when their work is more, and when we reach them throughout the world for the purpose. Now, in distribution, and maybe that's by what you mean by the pole that's been there for a long time. Of course, it's been deteriorating for a long time. When your power goes out, it's for that reason, very likely of a local distribution failure. That is a new opportunity for the sophistication of this modeling and simulation. And, you know, that should be modeled as a take-up over a long ramp.
All right. I appreciate the distinction between the production and distribution. Thank you so much. I'll stick to my one question. Thank you.
Let's go to Brad Sills, Bank of America.
Oh, great. Hey, guys. Sorry about that. Well, congratulations on the deal here. It looks exciting. I wanted to ask about, you know, their install base versus your install base. You're coming at this with, you know, a position of strength in distribution and in substation, and PLS brings in the transmission side. Can you help us understand kind of where the opportunity is potentially in your install base, for perhaps upsell into, you know, of the PLS to your install base and then vice versa? Where are some low-hanging fruit where you see, you know, where there's no overlap in customers, that there could be some cross-sell opportunity?
Well, most of the utilities have some transmission assets. They own the substation assets and all the distribution assets. I haven't talked enough about substation. Substation is an aspect of the grid that went to 3D earlier, along with transmission. Perhaps transmission did so earliest on the distribution side, it started in substations, and we have a good business in that. What I'm told is that in substation modeling, you care about the transmission aspect, because of course you're physically connected to transmission structures. So there is the framing and the wire structural to worry about. But your resilience is to need to know what might happen if there's a transmission problem coming into your substation, so you could switch something over and avoid some outages that would otherwise occur.
That's the notion of an overall integrated grid digital twin and understanding the interconnections to help with better service and resilience. The other opportunity in our distribution install base is the more sophisticated tools from Power Line Systems that can be applied to distribution structures and distribution wires as well. There's an education and a learning curve for that, but where there exists 3D models that becomes valuable. I think we can help there be 3D models of distribution through the reality modeling opportunity.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Greg. Maybe one for you, David. You mentioned the $30 million contribution this year. Can you give us a sense for the annualized, you know, revenue base and you mentioned the growth rate. I think we can kinda get there, and EBITDA, but anything you can provide on just, you know, what that revenue base looks like today? Thank you.
It's growing. $30 million reflects an extension of the existing growth. Today it's gonna be under $30 million, but for 2022, we're expecting it to deliver $30 million of subscription revenue, and it's all subscription revenue. Again, the synergies we talked about, any immediate tailwinds from Infrastructure Act could be additive to that, but we're expecting $30 million, which is all subscription.
Okay. All subscription revenue pretty much?
Yes.
Okay. Got it. All right. Thanks so much, guys.
We'll try Jason again. Jason?
Jason may have been subject to a grid outage, which we're working on, Jason.
Sorry, Jason. I don't have control over that. We'll go next to Matt Swanson.
All right. Can you guys hear me?
Yes.
All right. Perfect. Just one question for me, the kind of two parts. You know, ESG is obviously this multi-year theme, right? Going out to when we're talking about goals to 2050. Everything you've said really makes it feel like this is the precursor to broader renewable energy adoption. We've also talked about a shortage of civil engineers overall, but even more so on the specialized basis. I guess when we're thinking about this precursor, you know, maybe being thought of as the choke point right now to renewable energy adoption, and then these engineers at the choke point to improving transmissions. Could you just talk about the play of digitalization and getting more and more specialized in these applications to kind of, you know, unclogging this logjam?
Well, on transmission, those who haven't gone to the PLS tools will do so. It's well worth it for them, given the value of the work, what they charge for the work, and so forth. It's just a good example of when I say application mix accretion, going to more specialized products. For instance, we have OpenWindPower and so forth, can increase by an order of magnitude what we can charge for those products because of the productivity gain. I think that's in transmission. In distribution, again, an even larger opportunity and the distribution network is what has to carry the electrification of everything we're talking about and carry it in two directions.
That really is a logjam that's not gonna be solved with more people working the way they are now. It really is more a fundamental enterprise opportunity for digital twins. That does require changes in workflows. You know, some utilities have unionized draftsmen in recent memory and so forth. But it's really ripe to work on it at this time. Again, the two different pictures with substation in the middle, literally in the middle.
All right. Thank you guys for the time.
Let's go to Jay from Griffin.
Thank you. Good morning. The business question is, according to the Power Line website, they sell their software to about 1,600 organizations. It's not clear if those are all current active customers, but one inference seems to be a quite low average revenue per customer, perhaps in the low tens of thousands of dollars. If that's right, how do you foresee perhaps either significantly scaling the average per customer or the number of customers? Secondly, Greg, a more technology question, how current or modern would you say their software is? I mean, they've been around for a long time, as you've noted, but in terms of their development or redevelopment of the software, how, let's say, modern would you say it is?
Well, first, I never put a lot of stock in counts of customers, especially in smaller companies, when that's counted. It's not that anybody's doing anything wrong, it's just that do you count the same engineering firm as 10 different customers if 10 different offices get invoices and pay them. At Bentley Systems, where we roll everything up to an enterprise discount and so forth, we and our accounts are incentivized to have everything be counted under the top level of hierarchy in the organization. I think if we were looking at things the same way, there would be a different count for that, is my strong surmise. The software keeps getting reinvented over this period of time.
I think you have to talk to transmission engineers to understand how much they love it, how much it is their mainstay. For instance, the lidar capabilities there now were not there years ago, and so forth. I think they're pretty good about evolution, not revolution. I think we will, you know, upon the acquisition closing, be able to add some aspects, especially for project delivery, ProjectWise and AssetWise. We'll have things to contribute and ultimately, the digital twin opportunity will add new aspects of secure access to the software and so forth. It is a really strong and capable development team, and we look forward to being shoulder to shoulder with them.
A quick technical follow-up, if I may. The structures would seem to be not only a design problem, but inherently a sort of like simulation problem, particularly in terms of, let's say, electromagnetics and the like. I mean, what can you do to solve the inherent simulation requirements for transmission?
Well, that has probably gotten to a technical question that needs to be answered by an engineer other than me. I think the main simulation problem is that of conductor wires and the interaction with the structures. It's mainly a structural simulation problem that is the particular requirement, their focus that has kept the rest of us out of attempting it, frankly, because of the structural barrier to entry and getting it right.
We have very good generalized structural modeling software. When you have the cables tugging from one to the other, I think that gets to something that requires specialization. I don't know of other aspects. I know electromagnetic is something we do with geotechnical and Seequent, but it's beyond my ability to answer. We are probably out of time, aren't we, Carey?
Yes. We're a couple minutes over where we'd like to go and good discussion. I'm glad to hear and look forward to following up with you guys.
Thank you. It's a genuinely exhilarating acquisition for us to help with what is everyone else's priority in the world at the moment. Rarely does the whole world pull in one direction here now. It's great to be investing on our part and helping with Power Line Systems, the infrastructure engineers who want to make such a contribution here as well to energy transitions. Thank you.
Thank you.