 So, just very quickly by background, I'll just so you know where I come from. I've actually been living in Berlin for the last 13 years. I wanted to become a finance professor. I met a German and stayed and somehow got into energy. And I've been involved really in financing alternative energy for the last decade. And I've been also involved in actually helping the German government in terms of their energy policy. I've recently been asked to try and help the British government who've got a plan A, which is called Nuclear. They don't have a plan B. I'm trying to help them with a plan B, but it's not really working. So that's my background. So let me just embracing the digital energy revolution. So let's talk a little bit about technology. I've been financing technology. That's where I come from. If we look around us, technology changes everywhere. Creative destruction is all around us. We've never seen more change in our world than the last 10 years. The interesting thing though, the most transformational leaps forward in mankind all happen in the energy space. And as an Irish man, if I look at the industrial revolution, it didn't happen here. And the major reason was not that we were less intelligent than the English. The reason was we didn't have any coal. Very simple. Then comes Devalera. And guess what? Well, he was more concerned about commonly maidens and dairy farmers than he was about oil. Meanwhile, the American economy, the world economy revolutionized by that. The interesting thing about that, of course, is today, still, a century on, oil is the most important energy source globally. And it's used for everything and anything around us. The interesting thing, of course, is that it is still very cheap. I mean, really, you go, we're going to a restaurant tonight, a liter of water. We're going to moan and groan about the liter of oil that we put into our cars. But it's the same price as really buying a bottle of Pellegrina water. And we assume it stays cheap. Everybody assumes it stays cheap. However, the interesting thing, and I always say this, is that what happens when 1.3 billion Chinese become German? Well, the interesting thing is, car possession would move from 60 million to 710 million, right? What does that mean in terms of oil? China would need 30 million barrels a day, 85 million today, right? We can look at this and say this isn't going to happen. But let's be honest, if I show you, China's already on the way. I'll just give you the numbers here. China, 18 million new cars on the road this year. The United States, 12 million, right? So basically, China is the equivalent of the USA, Germany, France, Italy, together. That's how much new cars are coming on the Chinese road every day. China's going this way, whether we like it or not. And there's a whole pile of other countries behind it that also want this oil. But the interesting thing is, we could take it really negative and take this Malthusian view. For me, this is wrong. The reason it's wrong is because technological change has happened. We have a global population today that has gone up sevenfold since his time. And of course, the reason for this change is technology. Check, obviously, population and affluence has an impact across the world. But if you have technology in there, you can improve the situation. And we see this in everything we do today. So I describe what we're going through now as the start of the digital energy revolution. There's only one problem, and that is you've got a pig. And it's not Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. It's called the ESB. And the reason I call it the ESB is because if you actually look in terms of the cost structure of this utility, it is next to impossible for Ireland to embrace the coming energy revolution. I'm just compared the ESB to MVV, which is a German utility which has very similar business model. It has distribution, it has power generation, it has an international business, and it has consultancy. And all you have to do is look at the average salary of MVV at 55,000. And the ESB at 119,000 and 91,000. I look at the profit margins of the ESB, double digit profit margins as against MVV with eight and nine percent. And look at the labor to revenue numbers. They're two, two and a half times the German utilities numbers. This is the first problem that Ireland has in terms of actually changing things. And I think Ireland has to be very active in doing this because if you don't, technology is going to kill this anyway. It'll be like a dinosaur, it'll die out within the next 10 years. Let's talk about this energy revolution. The first thing is we need more electricity. That's why I started with the ESB. We need electricity. Everybody around us, you see all our devices need electricity. Our trucks are already moving electric. This is Lieber's largest truck in the world, 2.8 megawatt electric engine. Why can you imagine trying to turn one of these things? You can't. You need to have an electric drive to do it. Port is a new car that comes on the market next year. Okay, top end car, half a million euros. It's faster in acceleration than a Formula One car. And it has better fuel consumption than a Toyota Prius. That's technology change. The other thing that's going to happen in this space is Silicon where we replace mechanical parts. iPad, 10 hours the battery lasts. We see them here. Why? Not because the batteries, the chemistry hasn't changed. It's because of the power management. It's a company called Dialogue Semiconductor. Makes the power management tools that enable that to last 10 hours. That's technology. Next thing that's going to happen is electronics will replace mechanical parts. Silicon will replace cables. Software will control more and more. I like this, this is the BMW 7 Series. New BMW 7 Series has more digital power, computer power in the space shuttle. The new 750, both sides. This is a 10 years ago, the 750 and the 750 today. The same one today is 25% better fuel consumption, 25% more power. The engine hasn't changed. What's changed is the management of it. And if you take a BMW today, you open up the engine of it. It isn't like a normal car. You cannot repair it yourself. Okay, you have to bring it into a garage and the garage connects into the BMW system down in Munich and it'll tell you what's wrong with the car. It's all done online. The next thing is that we're going to use energy in a much more efficient way. Be it smart meters, motors. The automobile is already changing, and the industry is changing. Homes are changing, right? We're going to use it in a much more intelligent way. And we're going to use different forms of energy and it's going to be much more locally produced. And gas will also become important. I mean the fact about it is I've been financing renewable energy companies for many years and gas has killed the power price in the United States. And the result of this is that you try to put a wind turbine up there. You can't do it because you can't get power purchase agreements. And if you look at the gas reserves in the US, they've gone up 60% in the last three years. The beautiful thing about gas is it's flexible. And the latest turbines from GE and Siemens, really you can use these in sync with wind or solar or whatever as some form of backup. The other thing that's going to happen is the grid. It's going to radically change. The grid up present is basically we send from here to here to here to here to here. That's what happens. There is no information flow between these parts. It's a beginning here to have a little bit of information here. But if you just take the case of Ireland, as I said, I don't live in Ireland. It was quite shocking for me that the ESB still go out and read meters. When why in this day and age do we need to do this? You just need to put in one small chip and guess what? You drive by in your car and suddenly you can download all the data, right? Now the interesting thing is when this happens, what does it do to the energy area? I'll come to that in a second. So Germany's been at the forefront of this revolution. And this might seem very strange given that it's in an industrial country. We'd say, what the hell are they doing going to this expensive renewable energy? Well, it's very simple. They import 70% of its energy needs. And they've had their gas cut off by the Russians three times in the last three years. And they're concerned about it. If you read their energy concept, they clearly state, peak oil within the next five years, prices of oil are gonna go up. That's their driver. I mean, they'll wrap it up in glomer warming and environment and whatever because it's much easier to sell that than say, hey, listen, we don't trust the Russians. But the reality is, energy security is the top of the German agenda. And Germany is radically changing its energy economy. It's moving renewable energies firstly. It's investing massively in its grid. And it's investing in efficiency. So let me just talk about the three things here. If I was to show you a graph of renewable energy generation in Germany, they've gone from producing 3% of their power basically 12, 13 years ago to 20% of their power from renewables. More importantly, on certain days, you're getting in the south of the country, 75% of their power needs coming from solar, just from solar panels. And solar has done a massive amount of damage to the power utilities in Germany. And the reason is, is because guess when the sun shines, when the Germany needs the power, which is during the day. The German power curve is like this. It goes up from nine o'clock till five o'clock. It's not like Ireland, where Ireland has power needs in the morning and peak needs in the evening. Germany is like this. It's industry that needs it. But if you look at it today now, you'll see that Germany's, all of its peak power needs are being met by solar. What does this mean? The utility makes all his money in these peak power times. He ain't making money at present, right? That's the first thing. The second thing that's happened is, all of these renewable energy sources are owned by people like you and me. They are not owned by the utilities. That 20% of the power is owned by non-utilities. Because the utility said, oh, we're not going to go into that because our return on investment is too high. The German consumer is quite happy to get a return on investment of 8%. Utility will not get out of bed unless you get it as a two-digit return. Well, guess what? 10 years on, he's got a competitor that produces 20% of Germany's power. He doesn't control the power supply like he used to. And the German government suddenly says, okay, you guys, you have priority access. Now, not priority dispatch, priority access, which means the renewables all gets taken by the grid. And the utility then has to go and sort of change his power supply to match the renewables. Now, not the other way around. Now, the impact of that, of course, is that the utility is under pressure. And then, of course, the German government says, hey, let's get out a nuclear over there. And what did the utility say? Oh, we've got a nuclear, our prices are going to go up. We're going to have problems with the grid. We're going to have to import electricity. Not happened. German power prices hit a five-year low in January. They've stayed at those levels. Germany, in terms of exporting powers, exporting five gigawatts a day. And most of this, believe it or not, is going in a summer day into the United Kingdom. It's very funny if you actually saw the power grid in Europe at present. UK importing power in from Germany. But they're doing it because it's cheap, because it's zero marginal cost. If I've got a surplus of power, what do I do with it? I sell it. I don't ground it. That's what happens here. Ground it. You worth it. No, you sell it to somebody. And there's always a buyer for cheap power, just happens at present that Britain is taking a half a gigawatt worth of power in a day from Germany. No, it's not working. So that's what they're doing in the renewable energy side. And creating a revolution in that. In the efficiency side, the German government has incredibly ambitious targets. And the ambition targets are to reduce energy demand by 80% by 2050. Now, you probably, as economists, look in the room and go, hey, this is crazy. There's a relationship between energy demand and income levels. We all learned that in university. Germans say, no, no, no, we can do this. And if you actually look what Germany's done, you can see that over the last five years, demand for energy in total has gone down by 10%. And the reason, again, is because of energy efficiency measures in particular. So you think what energy efficiency measures are. The first one is in the homes. Gas consumption in Germany is going down because they use it for heating. So if you properly insulate windows, you don't need as much heating. The second thing what you do is you do things like force legislation, which improves fuel consumption of automobiles. Guess what? Then what happens is you're losing less oil. So in Germany, the interesting thing is we've actually reached peak demand. Not peak supply. Peak demand. Peak demand for oil definitely has happened already. Peak demand for coal. Okay, and it's debatable about gas because of the need to, because gas is, my opinion, is actually gonna get cheaper over the next few years. So Germany has been very, very radical in these two areas. The third area is grid. If I was to show you a map of the German net, you would see that 15 years ago, there was about 100 power stations in Germany. Does anybody know how many there is today? Anybody? Just give me a number. One and a half million. 1.5 million generations that are actually generating putting power at intermittent moments into the grid, right? That's the, and by the way, the German grid is considered the most stable in the OECD. Again, what you have behind that is technology, right? So what do I say in terms of what Ireland has to do in this? Well, I mean, the obvious thing is firstly, the grid is of incredible importance. Ah. I'll start, it jumps to this one, this is fine. If you actually look what I think is gonna happen in the utility space, it's what's happened across and that's what digital technology's done to everything. We've moved to services and everything we've done. Now the problem is we move our meters to services as well. The utilities are in a very, very difficult position because they're used to selling electricity. So suddenly you're telling them, well, you're not allowed to sell as much electricity as before because all the renewables are owned by co-ops and people on the street. And secondly, we're saying, well, you're not selling as much as before because people don't need as much electricity. It's a disaster for these guys. And the European utilities are underpaying. It has started in Germany, but guess what? Germany's exporting all this cheap power out. So it's moving to France. French power prices have gone down, Czech power prices, Polish, UK power prices have all come down. So it's not just that Germany has an impact on itself, it impacts everybody else. So the question is what does Ireland need to do? I think the first thing is really have an ambitious vision. An ambitious vision for me is to really look at the risk profile of Ireland. Germany, 70% of energy is imported. What's Ireland, 93%, something like that? Right, there needs to be something radical done here. That's the reality. And it starts really with a vision of where Ireland needs to go. Innovative framework for investing. I think when I look at what's going on, obviously Ireland's got an economic problem that it needs to deal with. So let's try and be creative. That's what Ireland is good at. So if I look at it, I would say to myself, well, who else has got a problem? The UK. But at least they have some money. So let's try and cooperate with the UK. How do we cooperate with the UK? The reality is gas, I mean, gas storage. Certainly maybe doing something like the consale, using the consale gas field, grid connections in so we can actually ship off the surplus wind into the UK. And also when we don't need to take it back into France, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, build the grid out, but get other people to sort of co-finance with us. And there is no way that Ireland can do this without being interdependent on its neighbors. Next thing to realize is that Ireland has three global leaders in building energy efficiency. Yet they've got the worst housing stock in the world. I still am shocked by this. I thought it was normal until I went to Germany that every building had a draft, right? It's not, but we have the technology and we don't apply it. Next thing is, this is a beautiful thing that Ireland has. Ireland does not have industrial conflicts like a country like Germany. The better technology from lighting is not this one's here, which is what we've put in. We've banned these and gone to these. The reason we haven't gone to these next generation technology LEDs is because the market for lighting is controlled by Siemens and Philips globally, right? They pushed the European Union to say, okay, we're going to ban them, but don't go to the next generation of technology, go to here. The interesting thing is, sadly for them, when I saw Siemens, they were going to IPO their lighting division, I knew LEDs had come. These are all coming from Samsung. They will all come from Samsung. And these here in terms of energy, the last 20 years and their energy usage compared to these, sometimes 5% of the energy use of these. So that's an advantage that certainly Ireland has. Like your lump, this is Schlumberger. They're saying that there's lots of gas shale in Ireland. I think we have to go and support oil and gas exploration. Invest more into the grid, put in smart meters. That's it.