 To start with, I'd like to share with you three convictions that we have at H&G related to the energy transition and development issues or challenges. First conviction, although it is common belief that economic development and energy transition cannot go together, this is simply not more true. Why? In fact, when we consider what was used to be said in the past, stereotypes on economic development versus energy transition often include the following arguments, some historical reasons, industrialization of Western countries relied heavily on oil and coal, it should be the same in the emerging countries then. Second, capacity issues, renewable energy sources would not be able to fulfill huge energy needs of emerging countries. And third, well, there is a question of priorities, energy transition is viewed as a nice problem to have versus poverty alleviation. But in fact, all of this was true until new technologies made clean energy sources become financially competitive. And this is something which is now really new and known in the fact that energy transition is no more a thing and I think to think about it's becoming the best economic option. And energy transition is on the way and nothing will stop it, that's what we think at H&G. And even some negative announcement like President Trump's made recently will not be as dramatic as it may sound. I will come back to that a bit later. A few examples, for instance, as you may know, we now have bits for solar power in some emerging countries, bits in the Gulf region or in Latin America, which are below 40, even 30 euros per megawatt hour, which is very low. Second point, the reality goes beyond the size of the to be discovered oil reservoir. The issue is now clearly linked to the virtuous cycle of technology, innovation and economics. And in this possible future, thanks to this virtual circle, oil could become the new coal, meaning we wouldn't need oil anymore in the long term. And like just to mention one recent IMF paper, a working paper published last month, where indeed we could, the authors, consider that based on the current trend and the development of electric vehicles, oil could, which is today the main fuel for transportation, could have a much shorter lifespan left than commonly assumed. And of course, we have this huge development of renewables, which is by the way good news, responsible for a massive job boom. And according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, about 10 million people work in renewable energy industry throughout the world. And even in the US, there are roughly five more people working in renewable energies than in the coal industry. Second conviction, the fact that because it is becoming the best economic option, emerging countries are now considering the energy transition as an opportunity to accelerate to speed up their development. As we usually say, energy transition is driven by the combination of the famous three Ds, which are the key factors for speeding up the economic growth. First D being decentralization, second decarbonization, and the third one digitization. As we got decentralization, we see the acceleration of development through decentralized, cheaper sources of energy. And instead of following the history's path, a number of emerging countries will probably directly adopt solar PV and mini grids, skipping conventional energy sources stage with, for instance, power lines being deployed in the countries. And we have already a good example in some regions like Africa, where as we know mobile phones are now widely used in African countries with no need for long lines. Second D digitization, which is the core of the efficient economic development. We know that energy waste is definitely one of the major issues to be tackled. And thanks to digital technologies, we have now a massive source of economic growth by using less energy than previously. And this is typically the case in buildings where for countries like France, for instance, almost 50% of the energy used is used for buildings. Then we have decarbonization and it used to be considered that the issue of CO2 emissions was an issue for which countries. But we see that there are more and more challenges to be tackled in emerging countries linked to CO2 emissions, but also for, let's say, poor air quality, which often comes with CO2 emissions, for instance, when coal is burnt to produce power. And beyond pure economic growth, energy transition is also a very sensitive political topic. Because not respecting current climate constraints would lead to a number of disasters and we know what it is about, it could be floods and so on. Possibly leading to political instability, massive population moves, unrest and growth, which would definitely harm the development of emerging countries, which will sit in the front row of those possible issues. Another point I'd like to stress, the fact that energy transition also means that giving up oil diplomacy and reach out for the global world order. And some countries like India, some in China, have definitely understood that not depending on oil imports or coal imports, but mainly oil will give them a new core to play as emerging countries. And we do believe that geopolitics will never look the same thanks to the decrease of oil consumption in emerging countries. And then there is no surprise to see that emerging countries have become prominent supporters of renewable energy. They are now able to use cheap solar power to sustain their huge needs for energy without depending on oil and coal. And for instance, some countries like Morocco or Chile where energy operates. In those countries, green techs have been widely recognized as critical factors for energy independence and economic growth. Just one example, you may have noticed for instance that in India, it is foreseen that all vehicles sold as from 2030 would be electric vehicles. Of course it will need more power and more solar power to be produced, but this is what is expected in India. Solar is definitely getting really competitive. Other green options will soon come to the forefront, boosted by technological innovations. We have for instance offshore wind, which is becoming more and more competitive, especially in Europe, where now some players propose bits which are at market level, meaning that no subsidies are needed to produce power from offshore wind as from the next decade. And of course we need to get prepared for the next revolution being the storage revolution, the battery revolution for power. So now that we see that this energy transition and that green energy is the best economic option, energy transition is happening, what can be done to facilitate and accelerate it? I do believe that my colleagues will come back on that challenge. What we see is that beyond the energy country's specific situation, the issue between energy transition and development is also everyone's issues. And because this is linked to the global and the growing global awareness on warming. And what was rather interesting those last days was to consider reactions to Trump's withdrawal from Paris Agreement, where we see many, let's say, institutions, cities, companies stating strong support to the Paris Agreement, having in mind that this global commitment is key for everyone. So what can be done to speed up the energy transition in emerging countries and elsewhere? Locally we need to ensure a stable regulatory framework, which effectively drives costs down and attract investors and industries. And here we have a good example at NG in Morocco where there is an excellent regulation which has made it possible to announce the construction of some wind energy capacity that will deliver power at record low cost of 28 euros per megawatt hour. There are also some better regulations being put in place in countries like Ivory Coast in South Africa and also most recently in Zimbia. Second point to be addressed, it's about the fiscal schemes which need to be designed to build the adequate constraints and foster energy transition. And here, of course, the main issue is about carbon price. It's one of the most abused topics to be addressed so that the right price signals are given to the market to foster the appropriate investments. And there is a recent report published last month by the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition which supports the idea of a strong carbon price with some steps in prices by the end of this decade and by the end of the next decade up to, let's say, in the range of 50 to 100 dollars per ton of CO2. And in addition to this fiscal scheme and to the local appropriate regulation, we also need some financial stimulus from international network and Stefan, I'm sure you will address this challenge. We do believe that this international support is needed when local initiatives need to be supported where there is still a need from an economic perspective to have this stimulus, but as soon as technological solutions and business models can fly by themselves, there shouldn't be any more stimulus. I've just mentioned the need for new business models in countries like Africa and this is linked somehow to regulation. Many conditions are already here to foster green energy to be deployed in countries like Morocco once again, but what is really at stake is to be able to find the right business models in those countries with the right regulatory framework so that everybody can, let's say, find a way to deploy the right technologies in those countries. And last but not least, as regards the support from international institutions that we see as needed. I'd like to mention the Terrawat Initiative. Maybe you've heard about it. Terrawat is an organization that unites energy providers and financial institutions from all over the world. French companies are part of this Terrawat Initiative like NG. And the aim is to unlock some, let's say, some difficulties towards affordable solar power in the 120 member states of the International Solar Alliance. So this is key in our opinion to foster and speed up the development of solar power all over the world. So based on those three convictions, we are, let's say, very optimistic at NG that green energy will support economic development in emerging countries, provided that the right schemes, be it local regulation, financial support, fiscal schemes to send the right price signal are here to support investments. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thank you for the perfect timing, Antoine, not only for the quality of your presentation, but also for the timing. Thank you. So Catherine, the floor is yours. Thank you. I will start with two apologies. First, I apologize that my French is not better. Moi je parle très très peu de français, mais not enough to finish that sentence even. So I will try to understand your questions in French, but probably we'll need some help translating. I also, I don't know what to say other than I'm sorry for my President Trump. I will only point out that I'm from California and the governor of California is being very ambitious on climate goals. And after Trump made the announcement withdrawing from Paris, my governor went to China to meet with China to talk about climate goals. So there are other factions within the U.S. that are thinking hard about climate. So I want to take off from where Christian and Antoine started talking about the role of energy in development. And clearly at a high level, if you look at the relationship between energy, say kilowatt hours per person or, you know, BTU per person, if you want to include other energy sources, there's a strong relationship between those measures and GDP per capita. So development is clearly correlated with energy consumption. But what I've tried to do in my research is drill into that relationship and try to figure out how exactly energy drives development or does development drive energy as people get wealthier, they consume more energy. And one of the things that I really like about energy and electricity in particular is that it really infuses lots of aspects of our lives. We use it in our homes, we use it at meetings, we use it to power factories, we use it to transport goods. And so I think it's important to learn more about that basic correlation and try to figure out if we had a dollar to invest in the energy sector, what would be the most profitable investment in terms of driving development? And so one of the things that comes up a lot in discussions about energy and development is the fact that there are 1.1 or 1.3 or 1.2 billion people in the world who don't have energy in their homes. That's a fact that often gets cited at discussions like this. And there are a lot of programs that are designed to bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people who don't have it. And so what I've done as part of my research is to really try to understand what happens to people when you bring electricity to them. So we tell ourselves a lot of stories that if you bring electricity to somebody's home, the kids will study longer at night, people will be able to refrigerate food and therefore they will consume higher quality calories, they'll be healthier, maybe that they'll switch away from kerosene and again be healthier. But I really wanted to try to quantify that. And so what some colleagues of mine and I have done is an experiment. And it's basically the same idea as what pharmaceutical companies do when they're trying to develop a drug or trying to prove that a drug works. They have a control group who's given a sugar tablet, a placebo, and then the treatment group who gets the new drug. And so we've done that at a small scale in western Kenya. So we selected villages randomly. Some of the villages got treatment. In this case it wasn't a drug, it was the electricity connection. We paid for the households in the treated communities to connect to the grid. And then randomly selected another set of communities that were identical in terms of characteristics. They had the same level of income, the same education, same, you know, same engagement in the agrarian life there. But they did not get electricity connections, at least not from us. Some of them paid, a very small share paid to connect themselves to the grid. And what we found has been pretty striking to me. What we found was not what we anticipated. We found that bringing people electricity did not have very dramatic impacts on their lives. In fact, statistically we found essentially zero impacts on people's lives. We found that the kids weren't studying more and weren't getting better grades, that people's incomes didn't go up, that people weren't consuming different types of foods. So it's really made me think about how much of a role rural electrification should play in the energy transition. And I think there are a couple things to think about in rural electrification. One is that the people who are without electricity in their homes now lack many things. They're almost by definition some of the world's poorest people. So not only do they lack electricity, they lack clean water, they lack good education, they lack, you know, in many cases they lack stable food sources. And so it's not clear that bringing these people electricity is really the number one way to solve poverty. So I think it's made me think about that, especially looking at the people who we brought electricity who were using, on the average month they were using 17 kilowatt hours. The typical American uses that much in 18 hours in a day. And so these people were just not using very much electricity. In part they were poor and so they couldn't buy the appliances they needed to use the electricity. So if you bring people electricity you're not bringing something they can directly use, they need to spend more money to buy the appliances. The other thing, and this gets to Antoine's point about institutions, the reliability of the electricity that we were delivering to them is not what we experienced in the developed world. The reliability was very poor. And so in some of the communities that we were looking at they had outages that lasted not just multiple hours, they lasted multiple months. They had no electricity for three months. And so it's not that surprising that the impacts are small. And so I guess I would like to introduce into your mind some suspicion about whether rural electrification is really the way to drive development. I think there are other ways to think about driving development with energy though. And I'd like to throw a couple of examples out there. One is to think not about households but to think about firms. So one way to help the 1.2 billion people who don't have electricity in their homes is to get them a job, not get them electricity in their house but maybe power the local markets or the local factories with more reliable electricity so that they can expand and they can employ people. So for instance I had a conversation with an entrepreneur in Lagos, Nigeria where the electricity reliability is dismal. There are constant outages. So he was trying to grow a firm. His firm had nothing to do with energy. He was developing beauty products, you know, makeup for the local market. But he was keenly aware of the problems with the electricity sector. He had a backup generator. His internet service provider had a backup generator. His accountant had a backup generator. So basically in order to open a business in Lagos you need to invest in a backup generator. But that's basically like paying a tax in order to open a business. And so that prevents him from growing as a business. It prevents other businesses from even starting. They realize that they don't have enough to pay the tax to buy their generator. And so potentially bringing higher quality power to firms rather than to households is a better way to drive development. That relates to the issue that I already raised about the reliability of the electricity sector. And I think that there's been a lot of focus on households who don't have power because it's very easy to measure. We can quantify how many people live in a house without electricity. But reliability is something that's much harder to measure. And most of the utilities that we're working with in the developing world don't know that there's an outage until somebody calls and sells that there is an outage. And basically in many parts of the world, even the developed world, that's true. If utilities aren't using smart meters there's no report of an outage until somebody calls and tells them that there's an outage. And so I think this points to the need to collect better data so that we can really understand reliability. To collect information not just to provide to the utility company but also to provide to the regulator about the level of reliability. So I'm working with some engineers at UC Berkeley who have developed very low-cost techniques for measuring electricity reliability. In some cases they're using smartphones. And I think it's very ingenious since let me just describe it. The app on the smartphone detects when the smartphone is charging. And then if the cell phone stops charging it detects whether it's moving. And if it moves that suggests that somebody unplugged the phone. But if it doesn't move and it's also communicating this information to the cloud and so if there are other phones nearby that stop charging and did not move. The algorithm infers that there was an outage nearby. So I think given the ubiquity of cell phones as Antoine mentioned this is potentially a really ingenious way to use the cellular network to collect information about electricity reliability. So I think that's just one example of the ways in which collecting better data, generating better information, sometimes using the telecommunications network can help us make better decisions about the energy industry. So I'll leave it at that but I welcome questions and I welcome thoughts on really how to drive development with the energy industry. Thank you very much Catherine. Isn't it true that in the 18th century we started providing energy to industries before putting it available for households? So let us keep that for discussion. So Stefan, the floor is yours. Thank you. So good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here. So let me just to put this a little bit in context say that I happen to have spent a year since last August at the World Bank in Washington DC. And the World Bank is one of the main institution that is involved in like development policies and in particular in the field of energy and they're very strong on trying to connect people. So that of course is very related to the thing we've heard before and some of the sorts I'm going to share with you actually derive from the things I've learned this year talking to practitioners as well as researchers, applied researchers. So just to put a bit in context, so Catherine mentioned that there were like one billion people apparently approximately that live without access to electricity. I mean we live in dramatic times because in the last 30 or 40 years poverty has declined in very large amounts and actually we connected 2.3 billion people to electricity. But population is also growing and there's still this billion people out there which lives without electricity. Most of them are in Africa, about 80% live in 20 countries, 16 of these countries are in Africa. And some countries are making progress and others are not and we see different models which is interesting because then it gives us an opportunity to think about what might be the right models or the wrong models to connect people and give them access to energy. In addition one aspect that is very important is this aspect of quality because of course you can have access to energy but at different levels, different levels of intensity of quality etc. This is also true for water but we tend to forget that this is true for energy as well and on top of that you can have access to energy but still be considered to be energy poor. So we know that even here in developed countries there are people that have to cut on heating during the winter. Well when you use surveys from developing countries, in some countries you can estimate that people, among the people who have access to electricity about 30% of them are actually energy poor in the sense that their demand is totally inelastic. So they're not able to spend more if they want on energy. So why do we care actually? Well we care because we think that infrastructure in general in energy in particular provides important services to households and firms. So direct services and then there's this question whether it actually really does provide direct benefits which I'll come back at the end. But we also care because we think that this type of services have indirect benefits or what we call externalities. These externalities can be positive or negative. So to give you an example that is very important and discussed a lot in the field of energy, there's an estimation out there that about 4 million people die prematurely because of the use of traditional biomass cooking. So this is wood and traditional biomass in the developing world, mostly women and children. And this is caused by the emission of CO and carbon monoxide in particular it may matter. So clean cooking actually lags electrification. We have 1 billion people without electricity, 3 billion people lack access to clean cooking. So this is typically an externality that we think is harmful and is by product or a secondary benefit from electrification. So and this is hard to achieve because while we know that about a thousand dollars of per capita GDP countries start to catch up in terms of electrification, they don't catch up in terms of clean cooking for example. This is at a much higher level probably around 12,000. So this is just one of the challenge that we have in front of us. So the second point that I want to make and this comes very much from my experience at the World Bank is I mean we know that people probably need to be connected to electricity. This is actually a part of the sustainable development goals. But we don't really know how much we should invest or how much should be invested. We actually don't even know how much is being invested currently on a global scale. And this is very striking because you're probably all here about these big numbers that Pricewaterhouse or McKinsey put out there that this is 1.5 trillion dollars that should be invested in infrastructure. But actually when you dig into how these numbers are produced, I mean most of these numbers have no real basis in research and we don't actually know exactly even how much is being invested. So most of the time we base our estimates on national budgets or national accounts. All methods have problems. Sometimes we complement this using data from PPP database like public-private partnerships which give us some hint on private investments, quite imperfect as well. So I've tried to dig some numbers on how much is invested based on what we know and which is very imperfect. And currently we're about 2.5% of GDP in Asian Pacific and that's only for energy driven mostly by China who has very high rates of investment. We only at 0.75 or 1% in Latin America and the Caribbean and probably 0.3% in Africa. That's very low. The estimation that we have again based on these bad numbers is that well the level in Asia is probably fine. In Latin America we should multiply this by 2 and in Africa we might want to multiply this by 10 or 15 if we want to be able to reach an adequate level of investment. So another side of this is that of course, and this is related to the climate issue, doing so will add to the global energy demand. And we know now and partly thanks to the work of Catherine and her co-authors that as we electrify and as we connect people to the energy grid people also start accessing appliances and so their consumption increases much more than what we initially saw. So there is hardly energy leap froggings. There's some work by Artur van Bentem that shows that in fact the energy intensity of countries that are electrifying currently is as high as it was in developed countries in the past. For different reasons. One is industrial outsourcing and the other one is that people move to more intensive bundles of consumption. So probably as we connect this billion people that is still in connected energy demand will increase by a very large amount. So one issue and then that connects I think to Antoine discussion earlier is how do we connect these people. So there's some estimate out there that say 30% should be access to grid extension. I think we're talking about Africa here. About 50% through mini grids and the rest might be like standalone system like solar home systems. This has very different implications because generation for long grid tends to be mostly fossil fuel and nuclear energy while generation for mini grids is mostly renewable. So the design and the political economy and the regulation of this thing will be very different. So let me move to the last point I want to make which is about financing. So one discussion that is currently ongoing has actually been around for a long time but is being framed right now in the world right is this discussion about the financing cascade. So the thinking is the following. People say there's a lot of money available to finance infrastructure. So whenever it's possible we should avoid using scarce public and processional funds and we should try to bring in private investment without public guarantee. That we have very complex regulatory and financial issues that we need to solve and address and in particular for researchers this is very good news. The World Bank has conducted a very interesting study on what was called the Washington Consensus. So like 25 years ago people were saying we need to do four things. We basically need to create an independent regulator. We need to abandon vertically and horizontally possible. We need to liberalize and we need to privatize. And they've done something very simple. They've just done a review of which countries did that and which countries did it. And the answer is a bit troubling because in fact what happens is that many countries haven't done that. Many countries and especially developing emerging countries have done part of it, not necessarily the right order. So it seems like this whole challenge of regulation that we have at the time had answers that have not been followed for many reasons. Some of them probably political. And nowadays we face different issues because the objective has changed. We're not only looking at efficiency but we want to connect everybody. We want to address climate change. We have technological change. And so there's a new regulatory challenge out there. And my last one would be I'm strongly convinced that we cannot address energy issues in isolation and we love this effort. We need to think about the complementarity of energy, water, transport. They're related for direct and indirect reasons. But only in this way can we understand the challenge of energy policy and infrastructure. Thank you. Thank you very much. So before starting the discussion with the floor, let me give you a few questions related to this presentation. Kathleen, I'm surprised that you're here. I think you're prepared. But I'm a big fan of other normal books. How the last two centuries and what kind of innovation were the most useful for the people in the western world when water, sanitation are important as electrification. When you read that book, you see between the 18th and 20th century electrification clearly in the only world in the western world. So the fact that you get to discover that the electrification in the riverbed areas is quite shocking. So maybe when that seems to be a combination with the position of employment, so maybe you want to have a reaction to that? Yeah, a couple reactions. So for one thing, when the US, for instance, did the Rural Electrification Act and when we started electrifying, the income per capita was about six times as high as it is currently in Kenya. So it could be that in order to take advantage of electricity, you just need to be at a higher income level. And in fact, in our study, we're seeing that people who were connecting just aren't using much electricity. They don't have, on average, they have, you know, a light bulb and maybe a TV. We were then half of the households who were connected to have a TV. But it's just to reduce financing for appliances and lower the upfront purchase cost and let people pay for the appliance over time and that will overcome the credit mainstream to adding the appliance. I also think I should emphasize that our results are after people have been connected for 18 to 24 months. And so it's possible that it just takes longer, that electrification will lead to these structural changes in the way the economy is operating, but it takes longer than we let the experiment run. It continues to run, so we will go back and survey the households and see if things have changed after four or five years. I guess I will make one or other, but I think there are potentially other development initiatives that do have impacts in the short run. And so it gets back to this question of what you want to do first. So for instance, in the area where we're working in western Kenya, there's an NGO that gives cash to people. And it ends up that it's about the same amount of cash as the cost of giving them an authenticity connection is. And they see big effects after 18 to 24 months. So yeah, I think we do need to let it run earlier or let it run longer, but yeah, I think there are other development initiatives that take effect longer. Okay, thank you. Another question, maybe for Antoine and Stéphane, because you talked a little bit about that. I mean, obviously in developing countries, one of the big questions is concerned the expropriation of the investment. So you make the investment and then the state comes and take over for free what you did. And also I mentioned Robert Gordon. I'm also a big fan of the Rona Semoglou book on legal aspects of property rights in order to organize development. So do you think this kind of problem of the risk of expropriation is a big challenge for the problem of developing renewable energy in the developing world? And if yes, what should we do to be able to solve the problem? So I mean, this used to be and is still a problem for concessions of infrastructure. So as you know, I started my career with Jean-Jacques Lafon working on renegotiation of concessions in Latin America and then we found that like 70% of them were renegotiated in like three years. And it's still a problem. It's exactly one of the reasons why I'm saying that I don't believe private funds are going to overflow this market. Now, I mean, I don't think like renewable projects are concessions really or are structured as PPPs. But the equivalent of that would be the regulatory risk because if you buy, if you build a mini grid you need some security or some guarantee on how it will later be connected to the grid if that happens to be the case what would be the interconnection charges. And if there is a lot of uncertainty on that, I mean, there's kind of a similar way to actually expropriate returns even if you don't expropriate per se the investors. So I mean, this is a very relevant question and of course the question of commitment for governments in many of these countries is a huge one. But Antoine, do we know the duration of the commitment on the price of electricity for your Morocco project? I mean, this is 28 euros per tonne of CO2. It's for per tonne per megawatt. Sorry. For what duration? Yes, usually those kind of contracts are worth 20, 25 years long. So indeed there is a risk linked to this expropriation issue. But, well, according to the different countries we are active in, we are confident that many countries will stick to their signature. This is often a case that an issue that we take into account in the investment funds that we have at NG and we always have this kind of questions and issues to tackle. To an extent, can we be confident with the country's signature when we have such a long-term PPA? Of course, it depends also on whether this PPA are signed with countries or local firms. I mean, it could be, for instance, a mining industry with which we have a long-term PPA. And then, of course, the challenge is a bit different because the credit issue is different. But this is, for the time being, we find it manageable. So very related to the issue of expropriation is the issue of leakage. And we've seen evidence of leakage. So I agree completely that the institutions are very important here. And I don't know how to solve some of these institutional questions. But just as an example, we were working with the Rural Electrification Authority in Kenya. And the person in charge of assigning contracts at the Rural Electrification Authority also ran a contracting business. And so one thing we did is we collected information on what the contractor's invoices said. So, for instance, the contractor's invoices said, we put up 100 poles in a given village. And then we went out and counted. And there were not 100 poles, especially for the self-dealing, for the guy who was giving his own firm the business. We saw that there were, on average, 60 poles if he said there were 100. Thank you very much. One last question before I ask the floor to react. I mean, one source of tension between, in particular, Catherine and Antoine seems to be... I mean, you, Catherine, stress the fact that intermedancy, I mean, reliability of the supply of electricity is important in order to electricity to have an effect on behavior and on welfare. And Antoine, you were very convincing in the idea of what we should do, after all, is to develop renewable energy. But we know the problem of renewable energy is the intermedancy, and the fact that you are not sure the electricity would be there when you need it. So, in the absence of cheap source of storage of electricity, what kind of solution, given the importance of the reliability of the system? Thank you, Christian, for this question. For sure, reliability is a key issue to be tackled in any country, I would say, for sure. And here we have different solutions to ensure reliability on the grid and at home and at firm. In countries, in Western countries, because we have a global system relying on many different sources, we need to have the most flexible and the most economic one to supply electricity when there is no wind or no solar. And in Western countries, we usually rely on gas units which are flexible, which can start in a few minutes and which can then deliver power to the grid the most effective and quick way. And we do believe that gas will be part of the future in the long run due to the quality of gas to produce power. Now, when it comes to emerging countries, the question could be, should we also invest in such combined cycle turbines with gas? Should we have other means to ensure reliability? And here I think that there is no obvious answer about it. It will obviously depend on the topography of a given country, the quality of the grid, the capability of the grid or the grids to supply reliable power. And in the future, what we could see, especially in some isolated countries or islands, is that some energy storage will be part of the answer. Of course, it will take time before these energy storage solutions are fully competitive, but like for solar power, we do expect energy storage solutions to be cheaper and cheaper in the future. And we already work on some business models in Asia Pacific, for instance, whereby combining renewables plus energy storage, we could be in a position to provide reliable power. And coming back not to emerging countries, but a country in the Gulf region, there are some tenders where the country wants solar power, but not from PV, but from CSP. And here then you have an embedded solution to store energy and then to provide electricity at night house. It's becoming more and more competitive and it will fly in the foreseeable future. Okay, thank you. Let me ask you. Do you have questions? So you have the possibility to raise it in French or in English? In Dutch would be a little bit more complicated for me. My ask is in English. Okay, good. So I'm Dominique Pialo. I'm a French journalist. It's a question for actually all of you. So you think it would be more efficient to provide farms and factories, for example with electricity than households? And my question for NG is would that be possible for you? Would you say, Catherine, that all the big companies running to Africa with the will to electrify the rural villages don't really care about whether this is efficient or not and just want to sell their solutions? Would that be possible for you to make a business out of more solution like the one you suggested and not electrifying households directly? Does my question make sense? Do you understand what I mean? I mean, is there still a business case for you to go and maybe help people to create more jobs before give them access to electricity in the house? Thank you. So let me take a set of questions before... Yes, François Lévesque from MIMP hi-tech. I wonder whether there is a mismatch between the willingness to give money to projects by citizens and by public institutions, meaning that electrification seems very exciting and a very good idea. And on the other hand, as you told us, Catherine, the key question is if we have one dollar when we have to put it, what is the best way to put this money for energy? So how to correct this mismatch or is this mismatch a problem? And if it is an issue, how to try to correct this mismatch between the willingness to pay for sexy things or attractive things and what is really needed? Thank you. Let me take one last question before asking my colleagues to react. Also, maybe, let me... There will be another wave, so prepare your question. So Catherine, maybe you should react to the second question. I'm trying for the first. Sure. This is in response to both questions. I think there is also a non-economic argument for connecting people. There's a moral argument that everyone deserves to be part of the modern economy. There's a political argument, clearly. It's become very political in Kenya to announce the number of new connections. Although, as an economist, I will push back a little bit on the moral argument as different from the development argument. I think it's important to realize that resources are limited and if we give people an electricity connection we're spending money that we could have been using to give them something else. Yeah, I guess I'll also say that as an economist we looked at lots of economic indicators of electrification. So we looked at the number of assets that the household owned, that their income levels. The one thing that we found was impacted by electrification was non-economic and we just asked people, how happy are you? It was a small effect. It's not huge, but it was statistically significant that people with electricity were happier. I don't know what to do about that. They're happier even though their economic situation isn't better, but anecdotally we heard that people felt secure, they felt safer if they had lighting outside, for instance. Also, on this question of whether energy can make money without doing rural connections, supplying the firms, I would say yes, that maybe even they would make more money. Because the rural electrification has led to, in Kenya they're seeing a severe decline in the average residential consumption, that they're connecting the poor rural households. So Kenya actually has a reserve margin of 40%, they have way more generation than they need. And so connecting rural households is not solving that problem. Whereas I think connecting firms, which tend to be heavier, bigger uses, that opens up markets for energy. Maybe a few additional words in addition to what you said, Catherine, and I fully agree with you. As a company like NG, we make the difference between what is charity and what is business. We do support some charity actions thanks to some vehicles like rassembleur d'énergie, which is supported by our foundation. But when it comes to business, we want to find the appropriate business models in order to of course deliver what is useful and expected by our customers, but also trying to make money out of it. Because then we wouldn't be able to run the company in the long run. And for instance, we are active thanks to rassembleur d'énergie in some countries in Africa. While in parallel, we launched some years ago via an internal startup, a new business model which also exists in other companies to develop microgrids, even not at a village level, but really at a district level, within a village or within a city, in order to enable people to have access to the grid, to this microgrid and to have some electricity supply. And of course, putting in place such a business model takes time because there is everything to be put in place from the supply chain until the installation and the maintenance in the district to ensure that power can be delivered to the local people. To your first point, to your question, should we invest directly in electricity supply or should we first foster economic development and job creation? We will mainly focus on the first one. If institutions can foster the second aspect, it could be good in order to supply electricity to the people. I can just say a word on your question whether we can invest in projects that even though people don't want or can't pay, of course we do. We do that for rural roads. We do that for many other things. We do that for sanitation. We fully know that people are not able to pay the full fees that would cover the cost and especially not the long-term cost of these services. Where it becomes difficult is doing that and involving the private sector because as he says, the private sector has to see some return at some point and that's where we see all these problems with these PPPs that are based on availability payments and things like that and there's no real market test there. So that's a real issue. And on where we should invest first, I was shocked this year to learn that the World Bank doesn't have a methodology to estimate the return from an education project. So if we don't know the return from an education project, how can we decide whether we want to invest one dollar in education versus electricity? It's a huge issue. Even the World Bank, I couldn't believe it. I mean, you suppose that if this methodology was around, they probably would know about it, right? Okay, well, there's a lot of work to be done yet for economists, but we are here. Let me go back to one of the interesting points raised by Antoine during your presentation. You seem to suggest that even without the price of carbon, the development of these renewable energies in the developing world is profitable in one way or another. And that renewable energy is competitive compared to oil and other sources. I have been asking that kind of question for the last two years. It seems that more and more people seems to be convinced about that, but I don't have real numbers about that. So I'm happy to get these numbers of these 28 euros per megawatt for Morocco. But how far can we go in that direction without the price of carbon? Well, Christian, you're raising two different points which can be linked to some extent. I will try to answer first your question related to this decrease in prices levels. What we see in those last years is a huge decrease in prices for power production from solar and wind. Just a few figures. As regards production from solar, prices have been divided by 10 in 10 years. Thanks to technological improvements. And also thanks to the supply chain improvements. I think we need to keep in mind that this is also possible today thanks to a very efficient supply chain from PV production until installation in the countries. Another example I'd like to share with you is about wind. I mentioned offshore wind and we were struck a few weeks ago to learn that I think it was in Germany. Some companies managed to wind bits for offshore wind without putting any, let's say, requested subsidy for their future wind farms. Meaning that they consider taking into account the cost decrease to come to supply all the components of wind farms and taking into account maybe also an increase in world-side prices in Europe. They consider that they don't need any subsidy to launch those wind farms in the North Sea. It means that those competitors consider that offshore wind will be competitive at some point in time with other means of production. Now, with the link with the CO2 price. Of course, the higher the CO2 price is, the more competitive the other solutions are. The question is, well, at which pace and at which level should we have this CO2 price so as to definitely give the right signal prices to investors so that they make the most, let's say, CO2 light investments in the future. And there are many reports, studies and reports about this challenge. I have mentioned a wind. What we like today is maybe not a global worldwide CO2 price because that may be very ambitious but at least a regional price for Europe so that in Europe or in other regions we have a consistent CO2 price to foster energy transition and to make sure that investments go where it is best. And so the price should be 30 euros per ton of CO2? We can have different, you know, depending on the studies and the economics you make, there are different ranges. We consider that between 30 and 50 by 2020 which is very close by and around, we have in mind 100 for 2030 but those are more, let's say, guidelines that accurate our precise figures. But that will not arise soon in Africa. What's the alternative? African countries, I don't think African countries, even if the US isn't able to do that, how can Africa, given all the other challenges faced by those countries, seriously taking actions against climate change by putting a price at that level? I remember in Europe the price of carbon is only 5 euros per ton of CO2. The question could be, I will let my colleagues welcome that, but the question could be, does Africa need a CO2 price today? Why am I asking such a question? Because in some countries power is produced from oil which is very uncompetitive compared to all the means of production. So where power production is very inefficient, the same for some islands and so on, where power is produced from oil, in fact due to lack of competitiveness power production from oil will soon or later disappear because it will become uncompetitive. Thank you very much. Just to interject, I think people in this room probably understand this, but I have colleagues who get frustrated when people quote, levelize cost of energy numbers for renewables and something like $28 per megawatt hour and compare that to a natural gas plant because it's a different product with solar and wind, it's intermittent. And with the CCGT you can completely control when you're getting the megawatt hours. So in California for instance, we are running an experiment and trying to inform the rest of the world about how to operate a system with more and more renewables. And this spring we've had 20 days where the price in the wholesale market has been consistently negative in the middle of the day where we basically had too much solar production. We have a really rainy spring so we had a lot of hydro production and we've been curtailing the solar. So I think we're pushing up against the limits where we definitely need storage. We need cheap bulk storage. I fully agree. But to avoid any misunderstanding, that's why I mentioned bits and not LCOE. I'm talking about commercial bits and not LCOE because we do make the difference in it. Did we cover everything or do you have some questions? So I have one question, Antoine. Don't use, in fact, all of you, don't you think that if really, as you said, oil should stay underground at the end, I mean, those oil rich countries will react by flooding the market before it's too late, before those technologies really take over everything. So don't you expect a reaction by oil rich countries before it's too late? I will start and then I will give the mic to my colleagues. When we talk about energy transition, the two words are important, energy and transition. And transition could last decades. It will not happen overnight. And I do expect those countries to take that into account. When we see what's going on in countries like Saudi Arabia, where they have plans, okay, they have recently adapted them to be more realistic, but they do have plans to adapt their own production system to be more and more renewable, to move away from their, let's say, inefficient CO2 emitting systems. So internally, they do take into account the current changes to adapt their own systems. And of course, that's a point, which is that's a really good question to add to us. How the economic situation will be modified in the decades to come when less and less oil is consumed by the other countries? I don't have the answer, obviously, but for sure they have that in mind. At least I expect they have that in mind. Okay. So let me go for a try of a conclusion. So my conclusion from this is that it seems we should be quite optimistic. And given the evolution of the price, the cost of producing renewable energy, there are things that we couldn't expect to emerge soon that will emerge quite fast in particular given that even we have business people here ready to do something and already did something in fact. So that's quite fascinating. However, I think there are still many constraints in particular. The many problems related to property rights, regulations, institutional aspects that seems to matter a lot. We still have to work on that. Thank you very much. Let me conclude this session. So there is a break, a coffee break right now for 30 minutes. I reconvene here in a few minutes before four o'clock. Thank you very much.