Hello, everybody, and welcome to this, our introduction to our 9th iteration of MSR European Market Monitor for Energy Storage. My name is Tom Smout, I'm the Head of Storage here at LCP Delta, and I'll be taking us through the events today. In particular, I'll be administering questions and answers as we go. So please pop any questions that you have that come up in the Q&A function on your screen. I've got a great team with me here today. I'm joined by Silvestros. Silvestros is the research Manager for our energy storage research service. He overseas the whole Ms. process and he runs the storage research service here at LCP Delta. And so he's an expert on front of me and behind the media storage all over Europe. I'm also jumped by Evelyn. Evelyn is in our solar and storage research team. So she looks at principally behind the Metre battery storage research, but the research service that she's powerful looks at both storage and solar behind the Metre as well. And then finally, I'm joined by Yakapo. Yakapo is the head of policy at Ease. And ease, of course is the association of energy storage in Europe. So leading body representing people all over the energy storage value chain and business models. I'm going to take us through the introduction here very quickly before we get into the economy of the content, just as a quick introduction to LCP Delta. We are a data-driven consultancy, So we look at providing professional services to support all different parts of the value chain, right the way through from kind of strategic advisory and revenue forecasting down to providing research to support people with behind the Metre business models. So we look at both kind of in front of behind the Metre assets, including a big focus on storage. All of Europe. Of course, we've prepared this particular report in partnership with EASE, so eases the European Association for the Storage of Energy. It's a body that represents members and organizations all over the value chain for storage, so upstream and downstream. And it is responsible for kind of organizing the industry and talking to policy makers, convening the industry for discussions, and just generally kind of being a body that represents storage in the European context. So this report, the European Market Monitor for Energy Storage or Ms. is a report that provides a kind of overview of storage across Europe. So it provides capacity forecasts, commentary and business models looking across all of these different countries that you can see on the screen. Now there is very detailed coverage of the countries covered in blue which come with kind of in depth market and policy analysis, but there is also less in depth coverage and forecasts for the countries that are shaded here in the so great Colour. So before we get into looking at our analysis, I did want to gather some responses from our attendees. One question that we think about a lot is what's really driving storage deployment and what we should be looking at to understand storage deployment. So on your screen now, you can see a range of different options for things that could be driving the deployment of storage in Europe. So policy incentives, things like capacity markets or auctions like Maxa in Italy. But also other important drivers are of course, following costs, changes in commodity prices, and of course, the deployment of renewables, which create the intermittent system that storage is there to manage. So I'll give that a minute to fill out. In terms of responses, while we're waiting, I might ask Sylvestros if you had to pick what you think your key driver would be? Yeah, I will. I guess not willing to move the audience towards a pretty good direction. But if I had to choose, I would go with renewable energy deployment because it's sort of underlines everything. So if you think about it like some of the capacity market is needed because you have a renewable energy roll out and the simulators are worried about capacity, right or particular schemes like Maxi happens just because renewable deployment in Italy is in the South and demand is in the north. You know, it provides the volatility that will make the return of investment. So I think it's if you want the overarching driver that effectively drives everything else, even the CapEx decline, like it creates the need that effectively the demand for storage that drives the prices down at the end of the day. So, but, but I guess this looks at the longer term if you want to be very specific about what impacts it this year or the next year. It's often overlooked if you want, but it's really the underlying driver in my opinion. That's a it's a compelling argument, I guess I feel that creates the need for flexibility, but obviously there are different options in addressing that need and there are different things that make storage more or less competitive in that context. I'm going to give us another 30 seconds for people to submit their responses and we'll find out how much the audience agrees with you. OK, we've got about 100 votes, which I think is probably about enough to get a sense of the the general consensus from the audience. So I'll see what the general vibe is. OK, so interesting. 2 clear winners in renewable energy deployment and policy incentives. So that's good news for Yakovo about policy incentives probably indicates that you need to think a lot about the specific markets that you're in because of course, the deployment of renewables and the policies that you see are very bespoke and distinct, the markets that you're in. So now further ado. I'm going to hand off to Sylvestros. He's going to take you through the key figures for Ms. this year. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. So yeah, I guess the the moment a lot of you have been waiting for the the headline figures, what is the market looking like starting with this slide that essentially shows the total storage deployment across Europe across different technologies. So in terms of installed capacity, around 89 gigabytes of energy storage have been deployed historically in Europe by the end of 2024. And this is a breakdown by technology. So starting with about 53 gigabytes of plant hydro storage, which was historically the technology that made-up most of the storage capacity historically, most of this fleet has been installed over several decades ago. So it's not a capacity that grows particularly fast at the moment. Then we have the newcomer electrochemical storage, which is the technology that grows faster than anyone anything else at the moment. They sit around 34 gigawatts and this is broken down to 3013 gigawatts from the Metre storage and 22 almost gigawatts for behind the Metre storage. So roughly 60% of the installed capacity is behind the Metre storage. Then there is some large scale thermal as well. So there's 2.3 GW hours. And this figure does not include a residential scale thermal energy storage. So we're only considering larger scale here. And this also doesn't consider any sort of energy storage thermal technologies that have been installed in combination with concentrated solar plants. This would be for example, a molten Sol energy storage with a concentrated solar farm because we've we considered it as an inherent part of the technology essentially. There are also some other technologies. By other we would mean technologies like compressed air, liquid air, CO2 batteries, and any sort of other technologies that you can think of that doesn't fall into this packet wastimate. This is around 0.3 gigahertz at the moment. Now the map on the right is taken from our database Star Trek, and it's basically a map of Europe Colour-coded with how much power capacity has been installed in each individual country. So you'll see that most of the source capacity sits in Germany and Italy at the moment. Those are the heavier colored ones. And this is explained by the fact that both of these markets have significant volumes in front of the Metre and behind the Metre storage. Germany by far is the leader in behind the Metre storage. They also have significant volumes in pump hydro. So this This is why the coloring looks like that. Whereas in the other hand, other markets might be particularly strong. In one particular area, for example, Great Britain is the leader in front of Metre storage, but relatively it has less pump hydro, a smaller behind the Metre market. Spain, for example, has a lot of pump hydro capacity, but not a lot of electrochemical storage at the moment. So this explains the, the map, the, the much that you see here on on the graph. And one other thing I want to highlight before I move on is that you perhaps someone who, who is more notable in the figures, you'll see that large scale thermal we, we made the value in GB hours and not gigabytes. This mean has to do with how these projects are being reported where the the key attribute really there is the energy storage capacity and not really how fast they they charge and restart. Let me move on to then the next slide of what has happened in 2024, new installation 2024. So if you broke breakdown the the market for electrochemical storage in particular here in between front of the Metre, behind the Metre storage, we had the 4.9 gigawatts and about 12 gigawatts hours of front of the Metre storage and 6.9 gigawatts, 9.6 gigawatts hours of behind the Metre storage and more than one million homes with a new battery system installed, which brings the total to 11.9 gigawatts 21.7 GW hours. So just some key things to highlight here. First of all, this is the second year in a row where residential battery storage has surpassed 1,000,000 customers, which is a very good and interesting figure. And also it's worth highlighting that this is also the first year that from the Metre storage has installed more storage capacity than behind the Metre storage, historically behind the Metre storage. And you remember the graph I said before has deployed more storage in Europe. But we can already see the signs of this sifting. And I think this is going to be a trend going forward. If you look into the future in terms of the change, if you look at the right hand side, the overall market figure, it doesn't look overly positive if you want like only 2% growth in megawatts and the 35% growth in MW hours. But if you look at individually what has happened in its individual markets, this sort of makes more sense. So we had quite an aggressive growth in front of the Metre capacity, 60% in terms of megawatts and almost three times as much storage capacity in a single year. Whereas for behind the Metre storage, we had the slowdown in the market that was around 17 and 19 percent for megawatts and MW hours. And that part of the market being more significant overall sort of drove some of the numbers down. If you look at the whole system. Then moving on to within the future and the headlines for the future, we forecast that an additional 128 gigawatts or in 300 GW hours of electrochemical storage will be added to European grids by 20-30. And this is the the graph that breaks it down per per country. And that's a very aggressive growth. You can see that the currently the cumulative installed capacity is 30 is around 35 gigawatts. The capacity will have to grow by as much as I'd say four to five times by 20-30, which is just six years away. So it's a quite an ambitious forecast if you if you won my point, but hopefully you'll see why we see it going like that. Obviously, at the moment, looking at this slide, it's very hard to see the nuances of too many countries and also we have different market segments that grow in different scale. Therefore, I think we need to look at its individual market segment in further detail to contain a little bit more on what is actually happening. So with that note, I will hand over to my colleague Evelyn, who has been an expert on behind the media storage to walk you through what is happening on that part of the market. Thanks. Yes. So I'll be discussing our insights on the behind the metre market developments in Europe looking at residential and commercial and industrial or CNI. So to start off with, this slide shows the difference in how we sized the 2024 by the metre market in terms of annual installations in the latest version of MSMS 9 compared to our projections from this time last year in MS-8. So in the latest version, we expect 6.4 gigawatts of battery storage was installed behind the Metre in 2024 versus the 4.5 gigawatts we projected in MS-8. So there's a difference of 1.9 gigawatts. So there are some key countries that led to this change. Germany and Italy, who are the top 2 installers of storage in 2024 were the main drivers behind, you know, combined the accounted for about one GW of capacity that we underestimated. So we had identified the declining trend last year, but overestimated the negative impact of Italy's subsidy phase out on the market. And we also viewed 2023 as a kind of boom year for Germany and expected a sharper decline in 2024. So while the market did shrink, the drop was less significant than anticipated. We also underestimated the market in some other countries, for example in Austria and Poland where the market was a bit stronger than expected due to subsidies in place. And then finally, another factor was the fact that we got better market intelligence on the average system sizes used in certain countries. And since our numbers are based on the number of installations of systems that take place, this impacted the total power capacity in these markets. So in Czechia, for example, we found we had underestimated the average system size being installed in the last few years, which we increased to 9 kilowatts or over 11 kilowatt hours, as well as underestimating the number of installations slightly. So this alone led to us increasing the size of the market here by nearly 300 megawatts. Are there any questions at this stage, Tom, or shall I move on? We did have one question, which is why front of the Metre is doing better than behind the Metre in the current market environment. And obviously we'll talk about some of the things that have been driving the front of Metre roll out, but might be interesting to get your thoughts on some of the things that have been slowing the behind the Metre rollout as well. Yeah, I'll discuss that in the coming slides. But I guess one factor is also naturally these front Metre projects are much larger in scale than residential installations. So you know, one large front Metre project can come up to the size of the market and 1:00 country for the residential and storage market. And so this graph shows the historical and forecasted residential battery storage market in Europe up to 2013. It's by far the largest segment in the behind the Metre battery market space. And overall, there was 6.4 gigawatts installed in 2024, down from about 8.1 gigawatts of installations in 2023. So 2023 was a remarkably High Peak driven by subsidies in place and also concerns around the energy crisis. And we can see now the market is kind of going back to equilibrium and we expect the market to decline further until 2026. And this decline between 2024 and then it's due to a number of reasons. So there was a slowdown in the solar PV market in Europe also. And the residential storage growth is heavily linked to PV installations as in most cases batteries are collocated with PV systems in homes. So with solar market slowing down in key countries in 2024 and likely decline again in 2025, battery demand is also softening to some extent. We've also seen removal of key subsidies for residential storage markets in Italy, for example, reduce level of subsidies provided through its once very attractive super bonus scheme in 2023. But yeah, we we still saw kind of high levels of installations in 2023 and then dropping further in 2024, kind of in line with further reductions offered through the subsidies. And we expect this trend to continue in Italy for the coming few years once subsidies are completely scaled back and market recovery beginning in 2027. Spain and Belgium have also scaled back support in recent years, which makes kind of storage less financially attractive in those markets for the meantime. So the Spanish market peaked in 2022 and so did the Belgian market. But in Belgium, the market only slightly declined in 2023 as the attractive CapEx subsidy scheme and Flanders ended in March of that year. So there was a rush that led to kind of still high installations. But it means in 2024, we saw a more significant drop of about 18 megawatts in Belgium. But in Belgium, we do expect to see an increase at 20-30 for a variety of reasons such as the removal of net metering and Malonia and the introduction, the introduction of a peak capacity element to network charges and Flanders, which can incentivize consumer behaviour. And yeah, as I mentioned, 2023 was a bumper year for residential solar PBN batteries and it was really driven by high energy prices at the start of the year that has begun rising in 2022. So this decreased the kind of opportunity cost of installing solar and battery systems. And you can see on the graph on the left that prices have started to come down since 2023 and then continue to stabilize in 2024, meaning that this is less of immediate driver for sales and I suppose not on the mind of the consumer as much. And then on the graph on the right, it shows the composite cost of borrowing indicator for hustles, which has been increasing since 2022. Although it did start falling by the end of 2024, it still remains at a much higher level than at the start of 2022, for example. So high inflation rates, high inflation and interest rates have been a dampener for solar PBN batteries in 2024. And this is because it's made financing options more expensive and it means that households have less disposable income due to the cost of living pressures. That being said, we found that there's still, you know, sustained awareness post energy crisis. So even though energy prices have come down in a lot of markets, households are still more kind of aware of self-sufficiency and you know kind of managing their energy bills through installing their own home energy assets and it's keeping interest in battery storage hired in pre crisis years. And going forward then we expect market recovery from 2027 on and this is driven by decreasing technology costs, increasing electrification of the home and transport, customer fear, further energy price hikes and price volatility. And you know we expect to see new business models that will help customers and financing the purchasing of solar PV and storage systems, which is particularly relevant for price sensitive markets. For example, in Italy where those strong subsidies are no longer in place. And up to now, there really hasn't been many players offering financing in this market. There's also the increased offering of an adoption of dynamic tariffs, which will provide more incentives for batteries as they're kind of more easily flexed asset. Yeah, and I suppose you can see Germany will stay the market leader with over 500,000 systems installed per year. You can see that in the blue bear at the bottom in the graph. We do expect to see lower growth rates here than other markets and that's just due to the level of market saturation and the number of households who already have batteries. Any questions so far? Somebody has asked, do we think that there is a big place for virtual power plants, especially in the residential contexts and how we see the interaction between storage EV as heat pumps and other kind of demand electrification going on at the same time? So I suppose on the last point, yeah, electrification is creasing and this can maybe challenge battery storage in some extent with regard to EV charge points. But overall, we don't expect there to be, you know, a decline in installations, rather it may affect the kind of average system size of batteries. So the average system size may reduce once the home kind of starts to install these other assets that require a lot of electricity consumption. On the point on virtual power plants, I don't have a few on that right now. I don't know. Sylvester, us, do you have anything to say on that? Yeah. I mean what I can say is that well, typically if you look at the volumes of these batteries, I think that the key if you want application of them is to optimise your solar. PVI think this is not something that is happening a lot. I would say we don't obviously have figures for that. But if you look at the, the key application is really for RPV optimization. So this doesn't mean that those assets can you know, someone can get their hands on those assets and use them in in another way as an aggregator. However, I don't think this is happening in any significant volume at the moment. The the market is kind of the sales are a bit more clean cut if you want. It doesn't mean that I still like that aren't being used and you know, there are more like smart applications like that. But if you look at the overall volume of the market, it's just a small portion at the moment. There are some great questions coming in. I'm going to suggest that we move on for now. We'll have some more questions as we go through. Great. So this slide shows how many battery systems are installed in Europe in the left graph and then how many PV systems are installed per country on the right. So the different kind of different colours mean kind of reflect the different scale of installations per country. So we just showed the installed base in the five countries that saw the highest new battery additions in 2024. And as you can see, it's a pretty different picture between the two technologies with far more adoption of solar PV and homes compared to batteries in many markets. And this can be for a number of different reasons depending on the market. So solar PV markets are more mature and net metering has led to kind of more limited potential for residential storage until relatively recently in some markets. And it's still a barrier in uptake in the Netherlands, for example. And then it also kind of depends on the type of export tariff. Solar PV payback times can be a number of years shorter than solar plus battery payback times. And then also homeowner awareness kind of plays a role as well around, you know, kind of the, the benefits of installing batteries. So some countries like Germany and Austria have quite high attachment rates. In Germany, 55% of homes with solar PV also have a battery. And in Austria this is 41%. You know, outside of kind of economic factors of installing a battery for, you know, cost, energy cost reduction and PV optimization policy support also has an impact on attachment rates. So some markets are introducing policy that requires homeowners benefiting from incentives to install PV system to, you know, also have to install the storage in order to avail of those incentives. For example, in Poland where PV systems connected from August 2024 must be bundled with either thermal storage or battery to be eligible for the subsidy. And then other markets are kind of lagging in in the battery and solar attachment rates. For example, in the UK there are 1.6 million homes that own a solar PV system, but only 187,000 owning a battery. So we expect, we do expect UK attachment rates to increase a little out to 2027 on account of 0% that rate for batteries in place until then, but then kind of decrease a little to 2030 again as PV adoption ramps up a bit quicker than batteries. And that's all I have on the residential side unless there's questions, maybe I'll move on in the interest of time to commercial industrial. Let's have a great commercial and industrial stuff and we'll, yeah, circle back to some questions in a bit. Great. So, yeah, As for the commercial industrial battery storage market in Europe, it's the smallest segment by far compared to frontometer and residential, but it has started to grow quite rapidly in recent years with nearly 530 megawatts of new auditions in 2024. So one of the most interesting trends that we're seeing is how electrification is driving specific use cases for storage. So as electricity demand rises across Europe, particularly due to EV adoption and the electrification of heating, many customers are experienced higher peak loads. And so to accommodate this increased demand, they often need to apply to their local network operator for additional grid capacity. And then at the same time grid congestion is worsening. So these approvals can take a long time and come at extra costs. So as a result, a lot of customers are turning to storage heater is a temporary solution while they wait for additional capacity or as a way to kind of circumvent needing that additional grid capacity. So this has become a particularly important driver in the Netherlands where grid congestion is amongst the worst in Europe and they have quite high targets for electrification of mobility for businesses. And another key factor for growth is the strong link between storage and PV deployment in the CNI space, particularly for smaller systems where Co location is common. So we do expect that there was a slowdown in the CNI solar space in 2024 and this may have impacted battery storage market to some extent. But you can see we still saw growth and going forward even the recovery without battery adoption. Beyond that, Sweden presented quite a different dynamic where lucrative flexibility revenues led to aggressive growth in the market in 2023. But as remuneration fell in 2024, we expect a decline here in the coming years from 2024 on, outside of a 42 MW hour project for an industrial client, which skews the 2024 figures kind of overall in Europe. And yeah, As for our forecasts, you can see there's a jump from 2025 to 2026, and this is due to continued growth in most markets, but also a new scheme launched in Greece in January 2025, which supports CNI storage, which, you know, all going well. We expect there could be a boost in the market here in 2026 and 2027. And then looking to 2013, there's a more positive outlook for most market drivers. You know, group capacity is not expected to improve soon and electrification will continue to increase and battery costs are expected to decline. To some extent, the implementation of the new electricity market design will help accelerate the sector as there's more opportunities for flexible operation opening up. So yeah, well, it's a very small market today compared to the other segments. It has all the right conditions for more significant growth at through 2013. That's it for my section unless there are any questions. Let's keep moving from now and we'll still go back some questions in a bit. So I'll take over from Evelyn and move on to the front of the Metre market. And I'll start with the humbling moment again, how we fared versus last year. So last year we forecasted a 6.3 gigabytes deployment in 2024, what we have in this year's fork data. So the forecast it's 4.9 gigabytes. So we're off by about 1.4 gigabytes overall. And yeah, the reason why this slide is here also to explain why this happened, but I think it can also show some dynamics as to what is happening right now in the market. So if you start looking at the parts are below from the left to right, you'll see we we start with a fairly close forecast, let's say. So if you got stuck up the first five countries, reality versus expectation was pretty close in some countries. It actually was a remarkably close. For Germany, I think our forecast was only 5 megawatts of so very small differences like that. Where we start seeing some differences was first in the Swedish market. The Swedish market was one of the top performing markets in Europe for 2024. Evelyn already mentioned the lucrative revenues from ancillary services FCR, in particular in Sweden that drove volumes in the market. We knew that a big pipeline was getting ready to be built. However, we underestimated the rate of deployment. We used experiences that we had from other markets where some delays are quite common, especially if it is if it's just a market that is just growing at the moment. And so whereas we were aware of the pipeline, we boost some projects for 2025, but this actually didn't happen. Pretty much all projects that did connect in 2024 and then going on to Italy, some small differences, relatively small differences here that can be attributed to some projects, some project delays or some projects we expected for 2024 that didn't connect in the end. And those also had some, some contracts are tied to them. So we we had them as more certain as they more certain to connect than others, let's say. And then really we come to the the main point here of the difference which is Great Britain, which makes up pretty much the bulk of of the difference in our forecast. So as you can see, we underestimated the market there by quite a lot, almost 1.1.11.2 gigawatts. And the key reason for that was that we put, we over emphasize if you want the, the importance of timely delivery in some of the T -. 1 capacity market contracts. So by the end of the year, 1.1 gigabytes of those awarded contracts that we're supposed to connect in 2024 haven't connected already. This doesn't mean that these projects have disappeared or you know, will not come online. Actually most of them, I think the majority have connected in Q 12025, but it just shows that the market is going at a slower pace, which wasn't something that we have seen in in previous years where developers were just looking to get the projects connected as quickly as possible. And so this was also particularly big reason as to to, to why the decrease. I guess one thing to highlight here is that based on our methodology, which is based on looking at projects that are on construction and, and the pipeline and when we are off in the forecast, it doesn't mean that these projects disappear. It's most likely that they just get pushed back to the year after. And, and yes, I see a question. Yes, and Ms. 9 is the reality basically the the lower number and MS-8 is our expectation last year. And yes, let's look at some of the trends in the market for 2024 and then we can look into the future from the major storage duration. So 2024 had a very big leap in terms of the average system duration. And so the average system was Jason was 2.5 hours, which is quite a lot. And the big reason for that was, if you remember the previous slide, Italy had a big tank of the overall capacity and that capacity was tied into capacity market contracts from the first Italian capacity market auction. And those projects were for our duration. So big volumes with for our duration projects, it's sort of skewed the the overall numbers to towards a higher figure. However, the trend stands that projects are getting bigger. You can see also on on the graph below the number of two hour and 4 hour projects or two hours last projects just increases and this is in line with dropping CapEx cost, but also projects that will look to do more, let's say sophisticated operation in their revenue. So the market is not where it was five years ago where just doing some FCR or some ancillary services, let's say was good enough and now you need some trading in multiple markets for which I guess you need more, more capacity. And looking into the future, 2025, we expect the drop. And this is because as I mentioned, 2024 was almost a unique case because there were too many projects with four hour duration getting connected and 20245, the figure is going to drop a bit and to 1.9. But overall, the trend we see the growing trend towards 2030 for which we estimate that the average race will be more than three hours with a key factor here being that those are also years of delivery for the Italian maxi program that has some really long duration batteries by 20-30. But obviously the reasons that I mentioned before sort of targeting multiple revenues, wholesale trading, CapEx, the declines and everything are still valid and will be valid towards 2030 going forward to collocation of stories with other technologies, a growing application. Let's say we we would differentiate between collocation with conventional generation and collocation with renewable. You might ask why collocation with conventional generation? What's the driver for that? For this, the key reason here is mainly, let's say permitting grid connection reasons. So it's much easier to find grid capacity if you collocated with an existing let's say gas plant or a hydro and it's also easier to get permitting and everything. So this is, this is a key driver behind those projects. However, also collocation with renewables is growing and we, it isn't a part of the market that we expect to grow even stronger towards 2030 because it just makes sense from a developer's perspective, from a CapEx perspective, but also from a balancing perspective, let's say. And here just want to highlight that policy will also be very important in how this pans out. For example, isn't if in particular country renewables are sealed from negative pricing periods, for example this you know this will have an impact on us as to what collocation looks like. And similarly, what's the curtailment rate in a particular country and all those factors, I guess, will we expect to pan out in a more positive way for storage systems towards 2030? So we do expect to see more and more of this part of the market and moving forward to looking at the future. So I've broken up my forecast into several tanks to tell the different stories and different dynamics if you want. So this I have put the spotlight here for 2025 S next year and the we expect the market to grow by quite a lot and a little less than double the capacity for that we had in 2024. And here are some of the reasons for it. So in Great Britain, we expect the clearing of the very long construction queue that is existing at the moment. So I already mentioned a lot of projects that we expected for 2024 have been pushed back for 2025. And we basically had to go for the report looking at these projects that our undersection went as to 1 by 1 and evaluate when they're getting connected. And we feel confident that around 3 gigabytes will get connected this year. And then we also have significant growth in Germany, grid boosters projects playing a big part of it. In other markets. We have a good pipeline also in the Nordics, where Sweden also has quite some good volumes coming up this year. Also Finland is set to grow a lot in 2025. But also we see some smaller capacities in values other markets. So This is why you see also the pink part of the the graph is growing. So we have a lot of countries that are installing smaller volumes of storage yes, but they go from zero or not existing to installing a few hundreds of megabytes or which that just adds up quite a lot. And on this kind of spirit, I guess Greece as well with practically non existing storage capacity will install the its first projects from the auctions that took place in 20/23/24 in 2025 and then next period is 20/26/2027, which is what I would call the support scheme peak. So 2026 you see 15 gigawatts being deployed. That's a very big peak and it's driven by the support schemes and in particular the support schemes that are using the recovery and resiliency facility. So projects that are using this facility will have to be completed by 2026. And there has been a plethora of countries that have used these sort of support for from the Metre storage and the deadline being 2026, we expect a big peak there in that particular year. You also see that Spain, for example, with being on the graph also has a peak there because they also have projects supported by these schemes. In this period also, we see a growing number of merchant projects in in Germany. Historically, the German market was it was sort of slowly growing some innovation tenders which are not really merchant projects. I mentioned the greedy boosters before, but we see a picking interest in in Germany, which is going to be one of the top markets towards 2013. And that being said, by 2027, we expect the drop in the market just because the schemes will go away. So you'll see basically a pink bar goes down similar with I guess Spain or Greece or other markets where it's we, we would expect that after a big rollout of deployment, there might be a short period where things slow down to pick up again basically. And overall for this period, we expect to see growing challenges in delivering the very big pipeline in Great Britain. So we we don't expect the deployment rates to go beyond what we would see here in these years. And finally last part of the forecast, the late period where I think it's characterized by big schemes and kind of big volumes coming online particularly in Italy as a first highlight with the Max scheme that will provide support for 50 gigabyte hours of energy storage and the roll up will happen during these years. During these years we also expect to see a big roll out of the police capacity market driven projects. And so This is why you see a big chunk of of the parts art is made-up from these countries and overall from looking it from a country perspective towards 20-30. This leads us to in environment where where you have some of the leading, let's say clearly leading countries like Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, but you also have a a plethora of other countries where you have some sort of capacity. And from them there are some highlights such as France or Belgium or Greece or Romania, you might say, or Netherlands that Spain that come up a little bit on top of others. So but, but basically there's capacity pretty much everywhere. And this sort of also explains some of the different dynamics with behind the Metre storage. And the question before that here, you won't necessarily have one or two countries doing heavy lifting and very small markets everywhere else. You basically have a roll out that will happen on a pan European scale. And this I think it's good to highlight also the macro trends that are happening in this period, quickly referencing the dropping project CapEx, EMD flexibility targets that will come into play towards this period. And, and also want to highlight the, you know, looking at the scale of the overall deployment, it's good to highlight that there is going to be increasing challenges to actually deliver and connect these projects from a, you know, engineering perspective and also like from a system operator perspective. And and yes, with with that note, I will hand over to Jacob who is going to talk about some of the policies that effectively will feed into that forecast that just deployed you and some of the factors that I just outlined. Thank you. Of course, nice to be here. Indeed, it's particularly important that we try to understand what kind of state aid to expect, especially for the period after 2028 because as as Sylvester was highlighting very well, what we've seen in the past few years is very much the result of state aid coming from COVID-19 recovery, Russian invasion of Ukraine, interventions. So we're entering maybe uncharted territory. The European Union, the European Commission is trying maybe to give clarity to investors to energy surge operators and has released in February the clean industrial deal. In reality, it's the clean industrial deal is many thing is many initiatives under this this term maybe 2 where that we we consider particularly important that we wanted to highlight are the clean industry state aid framework which is yet to be published, but we know to great detail already what to expect there and the affordable energy action plan which was released only few weeks ago. So maybe starting from the clean industry state aid framework, why it is important because it codifies aid to accelerate the rollout of renewables. And this means aid for renewables, but also aid for storage. It codifies aid for the deployment of industry decarbonisation. And this means any technologies which is able to improve efficiency or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So also energy storage. And finally, aid for clean tech manufacturing, basically the entirety of the value chain from the component to the equipment to the raw materials and so on and so forth. So very clear categories. Today, we focus on on the 1st 2 ones because these are the ones that are particularly important if we have to assess what kind of state aid to expect in 2028 onwards. And therefore, let's have a bit of an overview. Again, this is a topic we discussed last year and we we saw with the Ms. 8.0 that there were so many option for statewide wise to deploy energy storage that we had what we could go what we could call a super scheme, spaghetti bowl and a single member state relying on different type of support schemes coming from Europe developed at the national level from you know, targeting different segments. Very complicated to understand a big headache if you were a developer. There's been efforts from the European Union to streamline that and and the fact. So if we look at the two categories that we were talking about before the aid for support energy started renewables roll out and eight for industry carbonization. We have investment aid for renewables roll out. We have 8 for non fossil flexibility support schemes. We have 8 for the capacity mechanism and we have aid to deploy in the civic Organisation. So starting with the aid to accelerate renewables roll out, this is probably a source of state aid that is going to come even before 2028. It's quite important because from now on each Member states who wants to introduce state aid needs to first look at its market and ensure that energy storage at any segment front of the millimeter. Ambient Demeter is able to participate to the wholesale market, is able to participate in frequency and known frequency ancillary therapies is able to participate in market based dispatching or congestive management services. So to make sure that along with that state A, there is some kind of market reform, there is some kind of legislative or non legislative activity that makes sure that the energy starts marketing that specific country can try and that's absolutely important. And the second option is aid for non flexibility support schemes, a topic that we touched upon last year. In a nutshell, a Member State has to assess its flexibility needs at different time frames from intraday to even monthly and seasonal flexibility. Based on that need, it subtracts what is the expected market based deployment of energy storage and it subtracts the other type of flexibility in terms of, for example, great development. And with that final number that the Member State obtains, the member state is invited to develop super schemes, non fossil flexibility super schemes to fill the gap, as I was saying, between what it will be deployed and what the country has assessed its need. And this is something that every single country is expected to do. So it's particularly important because from Sylvester's light and everything slides that we've seen before, we see that there is a huge variation from country to country. And so that is absolutely positive. Beyond that, similar to the previous type of of state aid, each member states needs to reform its market, needs to make sure energy storage business case is solid even beyond the state aid. So again, super important and this is probably and the most consequential state aid. We're probably going to see it only from 2027 onwards. This is like, let's say is technical time required from member state to develop such a mechanism. But it's, if I, if I had to tell you big one, probably pick this one to keep an eye on. Beyond that, of course, capacity mechanism. We've seen them really being the cornerstone for energy storage a deployment in so many markets, especially maybe in the market whose revenue streams were not fully untapped. And again, any member state that now wants to introduce capacity market must ensures that there is a reform of the market design that energy storage is able to make money, put it very blindly. And beyond that, if there, there there's some maybe push back against having capacity mechanism and state aid all at the same time. So there's going to be a bit of streamlining. It's going to be a bit more, more simple than the maybe what we see for example today in Italy with capacity Marks and Max at the same. At the same time we're probably going to see as I was saying, a bit of streamlining there. And finally the aid to deploy in the city carbonization. We do not know a lot what to expect. This kind of aid will be particularly important especially maybe for thermal energy storage, for example, or battery energy storage system. These are the two technologies that we see particularly deployed at the at the at the industry level alongside with either Gen. Of course. It's, it's a big opportunity. It's a big opportunity with a question mark maybe because it's where member states want to invest. Industry competitiveness is a hot topic. So there's going to be money for energy storage and member states will be forced to a great extent to become technology neutral. And energy storage is a competitive technology in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maybe improving energy efficiency. How much impact will this aid will have? Not sure. But again, maybe something to keep an eye on if you are a developer or if you're a manufacturer or if you're working with the technology I just mentioned. But beyond that, what I want to stress is that even beyond the state aid, even beyond the opening of the market that I've mentioned so far, the European Union still plans to introduce legislation related to the energy market, still plans maybe to introduce no legislative or guidance or recommendation for Member States to ensure I think maybe more of a monetization across Europe. And it does plan maybe to provide some kind of guarantees or counter guarantees or financing for energy storage technologies. It is this is because there, there's, there's a clear perspective perception that energy costs in Europe's are too high, that this is affecting investments across different sectors, that the market in Europe is still not, you know, harmonized enough, as I was saying, and that it's there is a need to to increase predictability and price stability. What I think you should keep an eye on is these initiatives. There's only selection of the initiatives announced because they will impact the energy storage business case, new network target designs, potentially a legislative initiative. Network targets are probably the oftentimes at least the biggest cost for an energy storage project. So an improvement of the network target, for example, changing or removing double charging could definitely really improve the business case for energy storage. The revision of the energy taxation Directive, something that has been in the pipeline for a long time. But the potential prohibition of double taxation for energy storage, the reduction of electricity taxes again strengthens the business case for energy started, but also permitting and grid connection. These are all barriers for for energy storage developers. We see the queues becoming longer and longer. Some some kind of activity at the European Union level shaping the national market is expected, maybe not necessary in 2025 more towards 2026, but it will have an impact. We also wanted to mention very much in Passan that there is some activities, for example, counter guarantees for Ppas. So we could expect further PPA development. But here the message is in a nutshell that there's a lot to come. There's a lot of to come in terms of seeing the cost of owning storage being reduced for the network fees or or the tariffs or the OR the taxation, as I was saying, more expedited projects because of faster permitting, because of a shorter grid connection queues. There is a chance of accessing state aid and there will be state aid for energy storage. There will be guarantees for energy storage. And finally, there will be more revenue streams accessible to energy storage across Europe. So there's a lot to come. We're particularly optimistic regarding the time frame that Sylvester was was mentioning before the 2028 onwards perspective. Do not fret if maybe especially in 2025 and 2026, we do not see a lot of announcements in this sense because a lot is going to come, especially as Britain in previous life toward 2026 and 2027. And once this change arrived, once this change materialized, the impact will be quite dramatic. That's it from my side. Back to you, Tom, back to you, LCP Delta Steam. Thank you so much, Jacobo. We've reached the end of the content that we have prepared, but I would like to circle back to some questions that we got I thought were a little interesting. We have a couple of minutes left just at the end. I did want to ask one question, which was what are the new business models that we're seeing emerge in the storage space that are coming up and that have come up in the last couple of years? I thought maybe Sylvestros might want to take that one. Yeah. I guess is it kind of industry wide or just from the Metre just but I guess let me talk about everything. Let's say we we have seen things I guess for all segments starting from from the Metre where we start seeing the emergence of like things like tolling agreements and you know new new types to interact with, let's say with your to agree with your optimizer, let's say Tom. So that would be one one way another. I guess as you go further down the supply chain, there has been an emergence of like rental or you know, let's say storage for a short term period. This is tied down to capacity restraints because those could be like short lived someone might need storage for just for a couple of years, let's say until they get a bigger grid connection. So they might not need to sign up for storage system on the longer term. I'm not sure about the kind of a new models for residential stories. They're going to say Evelyn needs to correct me, but I think that there things are. Haven't seen much, but yeah, Evelyn, any insights on that? Yeah, we're seeing some new business models develop in recent years. So I guess there's the one stop shop kind of energy management model where providers can kind of offer a full suite of services from asset insulation to energy supply management and helping customers tap into additional value streams. There's also kind of various financing models. So this can come in the form of very low interest loans with monthly repayments and then also leasing where the customer doesn't actually own the battery. And these may come with kind of reoccurring fees for added services like monitoring. Or it may kind of allow customers to have access to a special tariff in some cases. And kind of related to that as well as a subscription model, which is kind of a a newer, a newer model And that's gaining traction as well where I believe the customer does actually own the system at the end of the payments. And one thing that's come through in a number of these questions is just about the the concept of competition between the front of Metre and the behind the Metre storage solutions. To what extent are those two kind of business models in competition with one another in terms of competing for capacity and also you know, competing for revenues from low shifting? Well, I'll take that. I guess I think not a lot at the moment. It's obviously it depends on the context. I guess if you think about a obviously like a CNI battery, like a bigger scale battery, it pops into basically the same ancillary services revenues that you would see with a from the Metre battery. But if we disregard this, I think competition isn't very high at the moment necessarily because if you look at the big volumes for behind the Metre, it's on residential assets. And as I also mentioned before, most of them are, you know, are built with a simple model of just optimizing your PV consumption or you know, basically not a lot of aggregators or other people have their hands on them to use them in in another smarter way that could potentially compete in some of the revenues with the Metre assets. But I'm not sure this is necessarily going to be happening going forward necessarily. This is just what has been what has happened historically, if you want. OK. I'm going to wrap things up there because we have run over time a little bit. Thank you all very much for joining us. If you're interested in seeing the full report, it's available as part of our storage and research service will be coming out shortly and then members of EASE so I will have access to a abridged version of the report. _1743036059027